THE FIRST writer I watched at work was my stepfather, E. B. White. Each Tuesday morning, he would close his study door and sit down to write the "Notes and Comment" page for The New Yorker. The task was familiar to him — he was required to file a few hundred words of editorial or personal commentary on
some topic in or out of the news that week — but the sounds of his typewriter from his room came in hesitant bursts, with long silences in between. Hours went by. Summoned at last for lunch, he was silent and preoccupied, and soon excused himself to get back to the job. When the copy went off at last, in the afternoon RFD pouch — we were in Maine, a day's mail away from New York — he rarel seemed satisfied. "It isn't good enough," he said sometimes. "I wish it were better."
Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time. Less frequent practitioners — the job applicat; the business executive with an annual report to get out; the high school senior with a Faulkner assignment; the graduate-school student with her thesis proposal; the writer of a letter of condolence — often get stuck in an awkward passage or find a muddle on their screens, and then blame themselves. What should be easy and flowing looks tangled or feeble or overblown — not what was meant at all.What's wrong with me, each one thinks.
Why can't I get this right?
It was this recurring question, put to himself, that must have inspired White to revive and add to a textbook by an English professor of his, Will Strunk Jr., that he had first read in college, and to get it published. The result, this quiet book, has been in print for forty years, and has offered more than ten million writers a
helping hand. White knew that a compendium of specific tips — about singular and plural verbs, parentheses, the "that" — "which" scuffle, and many others ?
could clear up a recalcitrant sentence or subclause when quickly reconsulted, and that the larger principles needed to be kept in plain sight, like a wall sampler. |
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