Today is the birthday of Wiliam Strunk who authored (later co-authored with E.B. White) Elements of Style.  If you were an English major, this tiny book —usually referred to as Strunk and White — was your Bible.

The response to many questions was often: “What does your Strunk and White say?”

My old copy looked a lot like this:

It eventually felt apart and I had to replace it with a later edition.

Still lots of good advice in there:

“Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language” and “Use the active voice.” He also suggests: “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.”