what other people are saying

While looking over classmate’s blogs, I found one that I agreed with on many points. This was written by Chase. He said, “From what I recall in the reading, William's didn't hit the rules I discussed in my Strunk and White blog very much, mostly because it's a different type of book.” http://archasius.blogspot.com/ I faced this same problem while completing the “Comparing Strunk and White with Williams” blog post. This I believe is due to the different nature and audience of the books.
Chase also mentions that he found William’s more helpful because he likes to know why something is correct and not simply that it is. I completely agree. William’s helps understand why we do things and why things should be written a certain way. That way we can use the “rules” in everything we write and know how to actually apply them. For instance, both books mention the importance of the active voice. However, William’s goes further into the “agent-subject” importance by explaining that “…each agent-subject anchors the reader in something familiar at the beginning of the sentence…before the reader moves on to something new”. (38)He compares this to the passive by saying “…you find yourself shifting from one unrelated subject to another…”(38) This gives reason as to why an active voice is sometimes better. The audience is clear of the subject and the writer is consistent. The reader also knows where the action is taking place. As opposed to the passive where the subjects are changing and the reader doesn’t know how to follow. Strunk and White describe the use of the active voice with examples of an active and passive sentence and say that the passive “…is less direct, bold, and less concise.” (18) They offer advice to omit certain words from the passive sentence, but they still don’t explain why. William’s tells us why and how we should use the active voice. Not just to do it and what our sentence will sound like if we don’t.
The only disagreement I found among our ideas is that Chase thinks “It [Strunk and White] gave a good basic layout for each type of punctuation…” and “it would be a good book for reference while writing”I have to disagree because I think that so many “rules” in Strunk and White are out dated. They should really revise some of the language used and “rules”. There were problems with the apostrophe section, the listing section and many of the examples used are full of unfamiliar terms. Not to say that the entire book should be tossed out the window, but there are more useful grammar handbooks out there. I would be very upset if while writing a paper I looked up a rule only to get it wrong. This is another reason why I think William’s is more effective. I don’t believe that creating a clear, concise style that William’s promotes will ever be out dated. That is to say it will never go out of “style”.