Fliptron Trial Preparation

The title of this post is a pretty bold claim, since it seems that everyone loves The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. Also, I’ve never bothered to read The Elements of Style. But this book has been so useful to me that I can hardly imagine any other being better.

The book I speak of is Writing with Style by John R. Trimble.

The thing about Writing with Style is that it isn’t a writing manual. It isn’t a style manual. It’s a thinking manual. This book, should you read it, digest it, and practice it, will teach you to think like a skilled writer. In fact, the first chapter, which I consider to be the book’s greatest, comprehensively compares the novice and the veteran writer. This chapter tells you what the veteran does, and the majority of the following chapters tell you how the veteran does it.

An obvious implication of that last sentence is that there are some chapters that aren’t concerned with the thinkings of the veteran writer. And this is true. The chapters that don’t attend to thinking are, for the most part, reference chapters, but by no means do they embody any of the boring, tedious characteristics of your typical reference source. For example, Chapter 8, entitled “Superstitions,” does a masterful job of outlining and debunking the “Seven Nevers,” listed here:

1. Never begin a sentence with But or And.
2. Never use contractions.
3. Never refer to the reader as you.
4. Never use the first-person pronoun I.
5. Never end a sentence with a preposition.
6. Never split an infinitive.
7. Never write a paragraph containing only a single sentence.

I think I’ve broken 5 so far.

To be quite honest, I think I’ve got a long way to go before I begin to truly write with style. But I would be lying to myself (and you) if I said I hadn’t improved my thinking and writing as a result of having been assigned this book Freshman year. That said, I would recommend Writing with Style to anyone who writes on a regular basis because (and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise): Style matters. It matters if you’re a student, it matters if you’re a blogger, it matters if you’re a lawyer.

To close, here’s a quote from the final chapter, “Writers Talking Shop,” by Kurt Vonnegut that applies as much to lawyering as it does to writing: “This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.”

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