Item: 1 copy of The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and EB White

This is the 3rd edition of this book, not the cool new 4th edition that's out now.  I bought this for US $5.95, and I don't remember when or where or why, but I do know it wasn't because it was required for a class.

This book can always be counted on to be useful and entertaining, especially Part V, An Approach to Style (With a List of Reminders).  The following variations on Thomas Paine's sentence "These are the times that try men's souls," for example, always make me laugh:

     Times like these try men's souls.
     How trying it is to live in these times!
     These are trying times for men's souls.
     Soulwise, these are trying times.

I used to think of myself as a sort of spelling and grammar queen, but I'm becoming less and less sure of that second part.  I think I believed this because 1) spelling has always been easy for me, 2) I've always been able to find and eliminate most of the really serious sentence errors, and 3) I generally know more about what makes a sentence, a paragraph, a paper work than most other people in my peer group.  I must confess that I get a fair amount of enjoyment out of correcting other people, though I've learned that not everyone appreciates this and so shut up about it more often than I used to.

It's further true that some of the pleasure in this does come from fixing something, from taking something that's struggling to be said and helping it along.  Thus, disregard for the language from the rest of the world can be a source of frustration.  So I when I express scorn toward, say, an advertisement that reads "Our Sale's Office is Always Open" or something, there is a kind of concern mixed with it.  If I had released out into the world something that revealed my own carelessness, I would be mortified.  But I know that, in most cases, if I walked into the always-open shop brandishing the offending advertisement and pointing out the error, the response would likely be Why do you care so much?

I do care, very much, which is why I'm disturbed quite often lately at sentences that I myself have produced.  It doesn't necessarily follow from an ability to point out what everybody else is doing wrong that I am proficient at sentence construction.  In fact, I'm pretty sure I don't sound nearly as clean as (I think) I used to.  For this I'm blaming the fact that, with the exception of work documents, I've been writing for an audience of only myself for a long time and have let myself get away with too much.

Anyway, one simple stylistic problem that I think I've solved here is that of spacing between sentences.  No matter what I do in the editing of a post beforehand, it always comes out with 1 space after every period, where there are supposed to be 2.  It's really bad on some computers, where the text all runs together and it looks like I don't know how to punctuate.  This has been driving me crazy ever since January 1.

I now know that this is because web browsers only recognize 1 space between words.  It wouldn't matter if I put 10 spaces in there; it would come out looking the same.  Apparently you can fix this by putting "non-breaking spaces" in the HTML.  If this turns out as I hope it will, I expect to sleep much better at night from now on.