"Books have the ability to..."
Now I fancy myself a decent writer, however I now realize, to my chagrin, that I may have been using ability very, very poorly. Far as I can tell, on the surface it would seem that books don't have the ability to do anything. One reads a book, picks up a book, flips through a book. Unless someone or something interacts with the book, the book lacks any agency of its own. Right?
I guess if one were writing prose a book can be made to do just about anything. The author creates a literary frame, a magical wonderland or what not wherein a book is given the ability to do just about anything...like get up and run.
Really I am just picking at nits.
A cursory Google search produces several pages of results that have some form of "Books have the ability to..." on them. I take this to mean that the phrase is circulating and is not uncommon. I suppose Strunk and White would perceive this as nothing so terrible. But my intuition is that they would recommend that the sentence be re-crafted for the better.
Whatever the case may be, I will make effort to avoid attributing ability to books in the future. Although knowing myself, I'll likely fall back into the habit.
—gp
Below are the 11 Composition Principles from Strunk and White.
- Choose a suitable design and stick to it.
- Make the paragraph the unit of composition.
- Use the active voice.
- Put statements in positive form.
- Use definite, specific, concrete language.
- Omit needless words.
- Avoid a succession of loose sentences.
- Express coordinate ideas in similar form.
- Keep related words together.
- In summaries, keep to one tense.
- Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.
Available: http://www.writingclasses.com/InformationPages/index.php/PageID/305 Accessed: 01-16-2010
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