Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Spunk & Bite by Arthur Plotnik
An energetic book on writing style. I actually liked it more than "Eats, Shoots, & Leaves."
Sometimes when I'm digging for the right word, I long for a terrier-like acuity, a canine's sensory gifts applied to language. (xi)
Whenever I review those dictates from The Elements of Style, that cynosure of American composition by William Strunk Jr. and E. B White, I feel like I should make a dash for it, vault the gates into the free zone. (p. 2)
With some ten million copies rooted on as many reference shelves, Strunk and White has become the ivy (if not the kudzu) on our great walls of clarity and correctness. (p. 3)
Not that graphic novelists invented loopy onomatopoeia. James Thurber was there some time ago: "Tires booped and whooshed, the fenders queeled and graked," he wrote in one of his sketches. (p. 81)
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