The Elephants of Style by Will Walsh
Bill Walsh is copy chief for National News at the Washington Post. He has the
opinionated, snarky, curmudgeonly style of comedian Lewis Black, only instead
of politics, Walsh talks about the usage of contemporary American English in
writing. His first book, Lapsing Into a Comma was aimed at editors. This
one is aimed at writers. It covers basics such as capitalization,
abbreviation, and subject-verb agreement, as well as some big gray areas of
usage. Some of it is pretty basic stuff, but Walsh does an excellent job of
demonstrating both what works and what doesn’t with real-life examples.
The last chapter contains additions to Walsh’s Curmudgeon’s Stylebook, which
made up a large portion of Lapsing… The stylebook provides clarification
on commonly mis-used and mis-understood words and phrases. For example:
THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE: How much of the future is foreseeable? A
month? A week? If it were any longer than a minute or so, wouldn’t
you be a stock-market billionaire? This cliche is defensible only if
you’re writing for the Miss Cleo Monthly. It’s the near future for
the rest of us.
The Elephants of Style is well-indexed, to the point, and funny: an
unquestionably valuable reference book that I would not hesitate to recommend
to anyone. Unless, that is, they fear looking like a geek for reading a book
about contemporary American usage.