Science & Tech Quote by William Strunk, Jr.

Vigorous writing, Strunk insists, isn’t a vibe; it’s an engineering standard. The line reads like a rule from a shop floor more than a salon: trim the extra, tighten the bolts, make every component earn its keep. That’s the point and the provocation. By yoking prose to drawings and machines, Strunk smuggles in a whole ethic of modernity: efficiency as virtue, ornament as waste, clarity as proof of competence.

The specific intent is disciplinary. He’s not merely advising writers to be brief; he’s laying down a test of legitimacy. If your sentence can’t justify each word, the sentence becomes suspect. The subtext is almost moralistic: verbosity isn’t just unattractive, it’s irresponsible. Unnecessary words are the literary equivalent of a loose screw - they rattle, distract, and eventually break the thing you’re trying to build.

Context matters: Strunk’s dictum emerges from early-20th-century American pragmatism, when professionalization and industrial design were ascendant and when “plain style” signaled seriousness. It’s also a quiet swipe at the genteel tradition where flourish could masquerade as authority. Strunk is saying: stop hiding behind decoration; show your work.

The comparison to machines is doing heavy lifting. A machine has purpose, constraints, and consequences. So should a paragraph. It’s persuasive because it reframes editing from personal taste into functional design: the reader’s attention is a limited resource, and the writer has no right to waste it.