What, you may wonder, does Strunk and White’s Elements of Style have to do with running a Korean deli?

My father’s rule book when I was growing up was The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White, which he gave me a copy of in ninth grade.  Most people think of The Elements of Style as a book about writing, but it’s actually about character---specifically, how to be a crusty old man.  As a teenager, I hated it, of course.  Instead of teaching you to unlock your inner Salinger or Hemingway, it encouraged you to think of writing as a discipline.  Strunk and White saw style as dangerous (“Approach style warily,” they advised, as if it was a recipe for a homemade bomb) and creative writing in general as “the Self escaping into the open.”  Good writing, they argued, must be constrained by values such as modesty (“Place yourself in the background”), consistency (“Hold a steady course”) and respect for tradition (“Prefer the standard to the offbeat”).  To achieve style you first had to achieve control, which specifically meant not unleashing that unruly, appetitive Self.  A good writer did not show off so much as vanish into thin air.---from My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe.

I can’t answer the question I posed in the post title, yet.  I’m still reading the book.  I hope to have an answer by Sunday when I’ll be posting a review.

Comments

[John Emerson]

I once imagined Melville submitting a chapter to E.B. White.

I like the New Yorker writers of that era but if you put them in the big leagues they seem very limited.