Strunk and White vs. Williams

In my recent blog about rules from Strunk and White I found the “who/whom” rule very useful. However after reading Williams I found his take on the rule more effective. Willams gives a better explanation by saying “The form of the pronoun depends on whether it is a subject or an object of its own clause” and “always use whom as the object of a verb or preposition”. Williams explains the use of the word, not just examples of what is correct or not correct in certain sentences. So now I know why I am choosing the word for what reason. Not simply because it sounds correct. That is what I got out of Strunk and White, to determine which word to use say it to yourself and whatever sounds better is the correct choice. Williams also offers the great bit of advice not to use either if you are unsure.

The second bit of guidance offered in Strunk and White that I found useful was to “write naturally”. Williams touches on this throughout the book but dosen’t give a specific example. Rather, he focuses on things like to how to construct meaningful sentences and relate them to each other in paragraphs. This is probably the only thing that stands out to me as “better” in Strunk and White when compared to Williams. I appreciate that Strunk and White say to go ahead and write in a way that comes to easy to you and they say not to “force” anything and if you do it won’t sound as good. It was useful to me to be assured that when writing for work it is still ok to have a personal style and not to simply sound like you are just rattling off facts. It’s almost as if Williams expects everyone to have embraced their “naturalness” and is now giving us tools to revise it.
The topics I chose from Strunk and White that I found to be outdated or against what I was previously taught are writing numerals in text and the use of commas in a list within text. These also aren’t mentioned in Williams. This is probably due to the nature of both manuals. While Strunk and White was written to the newbies of the writing world, Williams is geared toward someone who has more experience. Maybe Williams expects his readers to already know these rules and only highlights the rules found in Ch. 10 “Usage” because they are commonly misused by even the most professional writers. Within the ten chapters and 200 pages of Williams, he only uses one chapter of it to spell out rules about double negatives and subject-verb disagreement. But Strunk and White write and entire book about them.
I feel the overall difference between the two manuals is the audience. Williams sets some expectations in his audience that they already know the “elementary rules of usage” but Strunk and White don’t believe their readers know anything about grammar and writing. I think that both are effective in different ways and almost for different revision objectives.