1970

James S. Blackmon sneaks the following notice in under the wire: "Here's the news from me, a person rarely heard from in the class notes. I married Carolee Kingan on Friday the thirteenth, April 1973. I had previously opened Country Comfort, 5 Allen Street, in Hanover in 1971. At the moment I have just finished my junior year at Dartmouth, as I left in the Winter of 1969. I have been accepted by the Tuck School for entry in September on the 3-2 program. Come see us in Hanover during Reunion."

Well friends, after five long years the jury has appeared to render its verdict; we see the foreman thumbing through a slender dun and blue paperback until he locates these oft-ignored words delivered of E. B. White a decade and a half ago:

"The volume of writing is enormous these days, and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria. 'Spontaneous me,' sang Whitman, and in his innocence let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius.

"The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day. Open any alumni magazine, turn to the class notes, and you are quite likely to encounter old Spontaneous Me at work - an introductory paragraph that goes something like this:

Well, chums, here I am again with my bagful of dirt about your disorderly classmates, after spending a helluva weekend in N'Yawk trying to view the Columbia game from behind two bumbershoots and a glazed cornea. And speaking of.news, howzabout tossing a few chirce nuggets my way?

"This is an extreme example, but . . . The author in this case has managed in two sentences to commit most of the unpardonable sins: he obviously has nothing to say, he is showing off and directing the attention of the reader to himself, he is using slang with neither provocation nor ingenuity, he adopts a patronizing air by throwing in the word 'chirce,' he is tasteless, humorless (though full of fun), dull and empty. He has not done his work. Compare his opening remarks with the following:

Clyde Crawford, who stroked the varsity shell in 1928, is swinging an oar again after a lapse of thirty years. Clyde resigned last spring as executive sales manager of the Indiana Flotex Company and is now a gondolier in Venice.

"This, although conventional, is compact, informative, unpretentious. The writer has dug up an item of news and presented it in a straightforward manner. What the first writer tried to accomplish by cutting rhetorical capers and by breeziness, the second writer managed to achieve by good reporting, by keeping a tight rein on his material, and by staying out of the act." The Elements of Style by W. Strunk & E. B. White © The MacMillan Company 1959.

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