Nib of the Week

Writers of English should want to use graphic, bracing, sticky words. As Will Strunk and E.B. White put it in The Elements of Style, “Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words.”

It’s not a coincidence that the two best floor speeches of the week — from Republicans on either side of the party’s internal populist-internationalist divide — contained no insults at all.

Whether writing for yourself or a principal, you have to tailor the text to the man, the moment, and the mission, and — never your ego.

Instead of inclusive and inspiring, Biden’s peroration was inexplicably petty, discriminatory, and self-contradictory… to no benefit!

That President Joe Biden’s 2024 SOTU ended poorly is neither surprising nor especially damning. But the comprehensiveness of his peroration’s failure is worth young writers’ attention.