The Elements Of Style, Strunk and White’s classic and still magisterial book about written English is in many ways not directly useful to a songwriter.  It’s all about written English – writing it ‘correctly’, including punctuation, spelling, etc.  Though very useful for prose, much of that doesn’t matter in songwriting.  Whether lyrics look right on paper and are correctly spelled or punctuated is irrelevant when you’re listening to a song – and listening is, after all, how songs are meant to be consumed.

But where The Elements Of Style does apply to songwriting is that it’s mainly about saying what you came to say in the most effective way you can, with as little waste as possible.  It’s about thinking clearly and using language forcefully; about making considered choices of words, word order… what to put in, what to leave out.

Songwriting being such a compressed medium, this is a useful reminder.

In most songs there’s not a whole lot of room for wasted words and digressions, so everything counts.  And some of the specific principles in the book do actually apply strongly to songwriting – for instance, the sections on ‘Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end’, ‘Express coordinate ideas in similar form’, ‘Keep related words together’, ‘In summaries, keep to one tense’, etc.

It’s worth noting here that if one is writing in a song about something that’s ambiguous, or a state of mind that’s ambivalent – that which at the moment is unclear – this doesn’t alter the need for the writer to be clear about what they want to say – and not say.  If anything, in those cases it’s more important than ever.

For example, some songs are not chronological, storytelling, or scene-setting songs at all.  Call them collage-like, where seemingly unrelated, or distantly-related, pieces add up to an effect.  But the clarity of each piece of the collage is critical, even if the overall effect may be elusive and hard (or pointless) to define literally – it’s sound, after all.

Reading The Elements Of Style is a bracing reminder of the power of well-put-together words.  It reminds me of how much power the songwriter wields when choosing words well… and how much power is wasted when we’re careless.