It's not a trick of grammar

 The Wise Woman, who earned a Ph.D. and taught college English, is skeptical of books about writing.

She saw many students who were terrified of writing. They came to her classes thinking that they were about to confront 10,000 rules, each of which would show them to be wrong about something, possibly in a way that suggested stupidity.

Telling stories is one of the things that makes us human, the Wise Woman said. How did this deeply human activity become so anxiety-ridden?

I had asked about good books on writing because I was thinking about what I’d learned in a lifetime of writing. But there was fire in her voice. I let the matter drop, and we tramped down the trail through the woods quietly.

Along the way, I remembered that one of the writers of one of the rule books had said something on the subject. I had to look it up.

 

Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, “Writing is an act of faith not a trick of grammar.” This moral observation would be out of place in a rule book were it not that style is the writer, and therefore what a man is, rather than what he knows, will at last determine his style. If one is to write, one must believe — in the truth and worth of the scrawl, in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message.

 

• Source: William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, The Elements of Style; New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., 1972, p. 77.