If you’re a writer who’d like to learn a thing or two about grammar and usage, you can’t go wrong with Strunk and White’s concise classic, The Elements of Style. Another favourite of mine is Line by Line: How to Improve Your Own Writing by Claire Kehrwald Cook.
Today I came across a more recent book with a title that plays off The Elements of Style: Charles Harrington Elster’s Accidents of Style. The book offers 350 common writing mistakes. As an editor, I was familiar with Elster’s accidents, but one—number 18—caught my eye:
It’s that big a problem, not that big of a problem.
Yup, the overuse of of. I wonder how often I’ve missed this mistake when editing. Elster offers other examples of the unnecessary of:
No matter how smart of a person or how nice of a person you are, you won’t be considered that good of a writer as long as you think the intrusive of is not too big of a deal.
That’s one insidious little word. It may be a small chunk of fat, but it’s still fat, so I’ll be cutting and slashing wherever it appears.
The Accidents of Style also offers readers the chance to find mistakes in writing samples previously published in newspapers, mags, books, and Google News—great for discovering how smug a pedant you can be.