I don’t remember who, but someone wrote that people who hand out the advice to read Strunk & White’s Elements of Style probably haven’t read it—the implication being that it’s not as good as its reputation. The names of famous works and authors often work as metonymies for common wisdom more than as references to their content, not just Strunk & White, but Machiavelli, The Modern Synthesis etc. The journal GENETICS, where I recently sent a couple of papers, have Strunk & White as part of the guidelines for authors, so I decided to read Strunk & White.

This is from the part that the GENETICS guidelines refer to, namely the famous ”Omit needless words” section:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

This is some good advice that is apt for scientific writing. All the rules that deal with vigorousness and conciseness would make life easier for all us readers of scientific papers:

15. Put statements in positive form.
16. Use definite, specific, concrete language.
17. Omit needless words.
18. Avoid a succession of loose sentences.
19. Express coordinate ideas in similar form.
20. Keep related words together.

Scientific writing is often too roundabout and guarded. I think that happens not because we’re trying to worm our way out of criticism, but because we have misguided notions about style that we get from reading heaps of badly written papers, and can’t shake without effort.

But there is also a ton of advice that is tedious and arbitrary. A problem with learning from authorities is that we end up reifying their pet peeves. The Elements of Style is full of them. There’s this thing you do when you state your opinion: You try to express it forcefully (forcibly, I guess, according to Strunk), but you are not Kantian about it. You don’t expect it to be elevated to a universal law. If it were, especially without the conditions that applied to those opinions, you might be unhappy with the results. Yes, we should omit unnecessary words, but for some authors, it may be more pressing to look for words to add, to elaborate, explain, and exemplify.

The same is true for graph-making (where should the y-axis end? what is the best way to show proportions?), the proper way to email university teachers as a student, the placement of figures in manuscripts to be reviewed, … In the absence of evidence, we substitute opinion, loudly spoken.