White was certainly a genius, but Strunk was a pinheaded frosh-hazing goon, and he wrote the book. Strunk and White is terrible. There really is more to writing than knowing where to put the apostrophe in a plural possessive, and if there weren’t you wouldn’t have spent so much of your life doing it.
If writing is that important to you, you should read Thomas and Turner’s Clear and Simple as the Truth. They answer all the higher questions of style that Strunk and White, and Orwell and Ogilvy and all the rest are weak or silent on.
It turns out that there’s a lot of cognitive science in writing. Once you develop an awareness of that, you can use it to impart tones to your writing to make it distinguished or whimsical or anything in between. It’s useful even for blogging and it’s deeply satisfying when you pull it off. It makes you feel heard.
Fine accounting of a brain finding itself in an almost lifelong habit, induced by family etc, of producing text more so than speech. A praise of habit so to speak. Finesse observations of what works for reaching lay persons.
> can I collate all the case studies of striking personality changes that occurred as side effects of deep brain stimulation?
This is a tangent off a tangent, so feel free to delete this comment… but I found the book "Switched On" to be fascinating—it's a guy with autism recounting how his personality changed after TMS.
White was certainly a genius, but Strunk was a pinheaded frosh-hazing goon, and he wrote the book. Strunk and White is terrible. There really is more to writing than knowing where to put the apostrophe in a plural possessive, and if there weren’t you wouldn’t have spent so much of your life doing it.
If writing is that important to you, you should read Thomas and Turner’s Clear and Simple as the Truth. They answer all the higher questions of style that Strunk and White, and Orwell and Ogilvy and all the rest are weak or silent on.
It turns out that there’s a lot of cognitive science in writing. Once you develop an awareness of that, you can use it to impart tones to your writing to make it distinguished or whimsical or anything in between. It’s useful even for blogging and it’s deeply satisfying when you pull it off. It makes you feel heard.
Why would someone use "Luciferean" when "Promethean" is right there?
Fine accounting of a brain finding itself in an almost lifelong habit, induced by family etc, of producing text more so than speech. A praise of habit so to speak. Finesse observations of what works for reaching lay persons.
> can I collate all the case studies of striking personality changes that occurred as side effects of deep brain stimulation?
This is a tangent off a tangent, so feel free to delete this comment… but I found the book "Switched On" to be fascinating—it's a guy with autism recounting how his personality changed after TMS.