Hákon Gunnarsson's Reviews > Write It Right A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults

I think William Strunk must have read this book before writing The Elements of Style, because he and Bierce often have a slightly similar humor in their rants about literary faults. And I find their humor amusing.

One example of Bierce's humor goes like this: "Banquet. A good enough word in its place, but its place is the dictionally. Say, dinner." The advice, in this and some other entries, has of course more to do personal taste, than some real fault in the language, but the way he states his case is still fun to read.

And some of it is still valuable advice like this one: "Love for Like. "I love to travel." "I love apples." Keep the stronger word for a stronger feeling." I think this really applies today even though the book was written more than a hundred years ago. People are still using the word love for too weak emotions, so when it comes to really say that they love someone the word is a bit diluted from overuse. But some other entries are archaic at best, so it's not all great.

This book is out of copyright, and I got my e-book, or rather e-books, for free from online sites. The first one I got from archive.org and that one is a little bit garbled like can be seen in this quote:

". . . than is possible in a book ofjhe charactex_pf_îs-Briefly. . ."

It doesn't make much sense does it? In the copy from gutenberg.net the same quote is like this:

". . . than is possible in a book of the character of this. Briefly. . ."

Which does make a bit more sense and would make perfect sense if I had quoted the whole sentence. It almost sounds like bad manners to complain about the quality of free books, but I have to say the copy from archive.org doesn't do much for Bierce's reputation. I use archive.org a lot and rarely come across problems there, but in this book should either be deleted or fixed.

All in all I like this little blacklist of literary faults, even though I'm probably not going to take all its advice too seriously.