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chasing

"Omit unnecessary words."

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I hope everyone knows you're quoting "The Elements of Style" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style

... and I hope everyone is aware of both the virtues and the limits of that work.

I'm not. Care to enlighten me?

Virtues: A lot of the style rules are great guidelines.

Limitations:

minor:

Style rules shouldn't be followed when they make things awkward or harder to understand; that's more a problem with some readers than the book, but it's something to keep in mind...

less minor:

A lot of the grammar proscriptions are confused at best (and not followed by the authors themselves, in that work or others). Language Log has oodles of examples: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll

A fun parlor game: choose a claim from the book that you think the book itself follows. Then your opponent has 5 minutes to find a counter-example.

Very nice.

There was a good article in the Chronicle of Higher Education a while back:

http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...

Note that Pullum is also the one who's probably written the most about this on LL, but certainly that's a nice consolidated case instead of a scattering of examples - thanks! :)

This is the right amount of brevity, IMO. "Omit words" doesn't give you a hueristic about what to omit.

"Needless" gives a test you can apply to every word. "Omit words" sounds simpler, even obvious, but only because you know it's a shortened form of "omit needless words". We could shorten the advice to "simplify", but that doesn't give you the how.

If a word is needed, obviously you won't omit it.

It's a tongue in cheek response to the EoS quote ("Omit needless words"), not - devoid context - serious style guidance.

eschew surplusage

Why use big words when grandiloquent locutions suffice?

Like a good wine words tend to grow with time.

(I believe the parent quoted Twain.)

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