Spunk&Bite-making your writing bold and contemporary

"The Elements of Style"

Despite its puny appearance, this book packs so much gravitas it might already qualify as a planetoid. Surely no tract on style has drawn more fervent American fans into its orbit than Strunk & White's sleek but strangely spindly oeuvre. Equally, there is probably no gutsier man in the USA than Arthur Plotnik, a writer and former publishing executive, a word warrior who "has boldly gone where no editor has gone before" - i.e. on a voyage of discovery to investigate the dark side of this venerable work, first "verba-formed" by the afore-mentioned Literary Gods of Style in the first half of the last century. Spunk Plotnik has in spades. And Bite too -. you even need to wear a visor when you pick up Spunk & Bite lest your face be irradiated by the neon yellow light leaking from its cover(could it be radioactive?). To heighten the confusion a wolfish jet-black dog sits at the centre of the irridescence, clamping a sepulchral bone in its jaws. At an approximate Becquerel ...uhm, sorry, I mean page count, of 275, the book beats the classically slim and trim "Elements" on hand-heft alone, always a feature I value in a reference book The chapter and section headings are tempting and "punny", eg "Flexibility/A Little Light Unstrunktion"; or alternatively they are debauched and sleazy, eg "Force /Stimulation by any means"; or they might even be pure Klingon, eg "Chapter 18: Hot Pop and Ephermaragy".

Picasso said you have to destroy to create, but destruction isn't Plotnik's mission (although deconstruction certainly is!). He respects Strunk and White but while some of their points remain evergreens, others, by today's standards, seem "just green"; writers would be naive to think "Elements" offers them the high-tech tools they need to capture the zeitgeist. What Strunk & White offer is a mixed bag, and wading through "Elements" is a bit like watching reruns of the original Star Trek series - lots of good stuff there, folks, but it sure ain't Box-Office. Outkirking Kirk, contemporary writers prefer a style peppered with innuendo, enallage (it's explained in S&B!) and digitally-enhanced special effects. Plotnik lays bare "Bold Contemporary" and we the readers are pelleted by the many nuggets of writerly wisdom he has managed to extract. But fortunately reading the guide isn't painful. I ordered my copy a few weeks ago and I haven't stopped giggling yet. This guy is a comic genius. He drip-feeds humour into his sentences, while at the same time sneakily depth-charging his paragraphs with powerful data-bombs. I intend to work through the exercises he suggests at the end of the book and maybe share some with you on the Hub Pages. I'm sharpening my quill right now ... er ... sorry, I mean I'm hotpopping my keyboard.