The Art of Writing Well

by Matthew Walther (July 2012)

Style: The Art of Writing Well
by F.L. Lucas
Harriman House, viii+262 pp.

If six million buyers of The Elements of Style had taken the book's instructions literatim, American literature in the second half of the twentieth century would (hard to imagine!) have been even more impoverished. Only by becoming suspicious of much great English prose can one hope to lionize a sentence like “Dead leaves covered the ground.”

Still, Style contains neither a single awkwardly constructed sentence nor even one poorly organized paragraph: of how many non-fiction books written in the last half century could one say the same?

Style falls short of being a classic. Yet Joseph Epstein may be correct in calling it the best book on the art of writing, for few great books have ever been written on the subject. With such a verdict I do not think that Lucas would have been disappointed:

Matthew Walther is an American writer.

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