Science & Tech Quote by William Strunk, Jr.

Strunk’s dictum doesn’t just argue for brevity; it smuggles in a whole moral universe where good writing is indistinguishable from good engineering. The comparison is doing the heavy lifting. A “drawing” without unnecessary lines isn’t merely shorter - it’s truer to form, confident about what deserves to exist on the page. A “machine” without unnecessary parts isn’t an aesthetic preference; it’s the difference between something that runs and something that fails. By yoking prose to mechanical reliability, Strunk reframes style as function, not ornament. Words are components, not jewelry.

The subtext is quietly disciplinary. Calling a word “unnecessary” implies a standard beyond the writer’s self-expression: the reader’s time, the argument’s clarity, the sentence’s job. This is the Protestant work ethic of composition, a suspicion of indulgence and a faith that meaning emerges when clutter is cut away. There’s also a swipe at a certain kind of intellectual fog: verbosity as status performance, the way inflated language can masquerade as sophistication.

Context matters: Strunk writes from an early-20th-century American moment enthralled by efficiency, industrial systems, and streamlined design. The line anticipates modernist taste - clean, spare, anti-Victorian - and the institutional pressures of schooling, where rules promise order. It’s prescriptive, even severe, but effective because it turns revision into a tangible task: remove parts until what remains can’t be spared without breaking the thing.