Is this good for writing?

>>8740764

It's a little old but it's filled with fine advice and info. Most of the tips are variations on "write clearly and briefly," so all the /lit/ babbies hate the book and think writing should be about showing off your large vocabulary.

dude kill your darlings lmao

>>8740764
Its a useful tool.
It will make you a better writer, but it won't make you a good writer. It's mostly sentence composition and grammar.

>>8740783
What is writing but a means to measure ourselves against the length of our lexicons?

>>8740884
Yeah, but you only get to do that after you have the basics down. Then you write dumb regular stuff, then maybe you stumble across something that people will actually think is cool.
By the way that book suggests I cut this down, don't use -ly, so I'll give my own post a 5.5/10 for ignoring the basics.
Don't read this post, wasting your time.

>>8740764
The Strunk parts are okay. The White parts are garbage. Read the updated version at http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/style-revised.html instead.

It's all shit. If you ever become an actual writer you'll get a style guide if you need it.

>>8740783
It is because of a misunderstanding. People think it is meant to be a guide to writing fiction. You can use it as a guide to writing fiction, but you don't have to.

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This is better. It's based on S&W and corrects many of the issues, based on a compendium of other style guides and on science as well.

>>8740764
no. it's too vague to be useful unless you already know how to write well.

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>>8740764
Haven't read OP but I recommend this one.

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>>8742605
>>8741431
Pic related?

Or Garner's Modern American Usage?

>>8740764

Learning how to write concisely, yes.

Learning how to write creatively, no.

>>8741409
It's totally useless for writing non-fiction. As has already been said publications have their own in house style guides that you have to write to, as well as their own style and such. As you might imagine "but Strunk and White said..." is not an argument if you fail to fulfill basic criteria.

All I will say about it in a vaguely positive way is, okay, maybe you're the kind of person who's a bit neurotic, needs some kind of validation for your writing, then just so you can get over that you need some highly prescriptive guide to micro manage how you write, fine. Just do not try to transmit that neurotic tendency: don't go around prescribing the advice in the book, don't even send out too much of your own god awful writing.

However, books like >>8742605 are good.