Why Didn’t I Think of That?
Helen Sword, ready to test writing
E.B. White appears skeptical
I had a post a while back about this test of how well one writes, and I ran a few authors through it to see how they measured up. But I never thought of running old E.B. White, of Elements of Style fame, though the test. The results are about what you’d expect. So the question becomes, was E.B. White a bad writer (hard to believe if you’ve read Charlotte’s Web), did he suffer from a case of “Do as I say, not as I do”, or has Dr. Sword (not a super villain, so matter what you may think) do a poor job of quantifying the rules that define good writing?