Véronique Vienne

In 1919, the same year El Lissitsky and Alexander Rodchenko founded the Constructivist movement and Walter Gropius opened the door of the Bauhaus, an obscure English professor at Cornell University, William Strunk Jr., gave his students a slim, self-published volume titled The Elements of Style. The manual was, in his view, a modest attempt to sum up some of the most glaring mistakes and stylistic faux-pas commonly found in the compositions of his undergraduate pupils.

For those dogged utopians who, like me, still believe that less is more, the humble grammar guidebook turned out to be just as much of a modernist touchtone as the Bauhaus manifesto or Lissitsky’s famous minimalist compositions. Beginning with a stern “Omit needless words!” Strunk spelled out principles that not only fostered clarity of mind but also translated in simple, brief and bold terms the spirit of a new era.

“Why say ‘utilize’ when there is the simple and unpretentious word ‘use’?”

“Statements qualified with unnecessary auxiliaries or conditionals sound irresolute.”

“The surest way to arouse and hold the reader’s attention is by being specific, definite and concrete.”

Arguing that prose is made more vivid when the writer evokes precise images and sensations instead of vague abstractions, Strunk treated sentences the way a typographer treats letterforms: with evident sympathy for the readers. One feels that he was as much of a designer as he was a wordsmith. As far as he was concerned, putting down signs on the page was an activity requiring a love of pure forms.

The original version of The Elements of Style would have been forgotten if one of Strunk’s former students, the American novelist E. B. White, had not been asked to update and revise the booklet in 1957, 13 years after its author had died. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, White was already known as the author of two classic children books, Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. His revised and augmented version of The Elements of Style was an instant success. Since, more than ten million copies have been sold.

Whether the book did improve the writing style of generations of American and English literature students is arguable. What is sure is that it offers some of the best advice for graphic designers, art directors, creative types—for people whose job is to impart information in a visual manner. In a recent re-edition of the book, in the chapter on “misused words and expressions,” White added a couple of entries. Among them is the verb “personalize.”

“It’s a pretentious word, often carrying bad advice,” he wrote. “Do not personalize your prose; simply make it good and keep it clean.” And as an example he suggested replacing “Personalize your stationery” with a more straightforward “Design a letterhead.”

I’d say: just eliminate the marketing jargon that is now a mainstay of a designer’s vocabulary. Good Design is Good English.

Herbert Muschamp, who eventually became the architecture critic for the New York Times between 1992 and 2004, was only 27 years old when he wrote this quirky manifesto. Printed on craft paper and bundled like a small parcel between two corrugated cardboard covers, it weighs only nine ounces, no heavier than a couple of twigs. Since 1975, when I bought it, the book got even drier and lighter, as the wood fibers in the paper pulp lost all their humidity. Today, the little volume resonates like a sound box. Instinctively, you drum your fingers on its cover. You riffle through its pages to hear them flutter. You hold its spine cradled in the palm of your hand as if it were the bow of a musical instrument.

The sensuality of the book is reinforced by its design. The text is set in a friendly typewriter font, the lines are generously leaded, and the columns are just the right width. Short notes in the margins, printed in rich chocolate brown, provide a welcome distraction. The layout is so unassuming and legible it soothes your eyeballs—which is a good thing, considering the audacious, contentious, and insolent nature of Mr. Muschamp’s prose.

An iconoclast, the author of File Under Architecture intended to deliver a series of scathing comments on modern architects, their arrogance and posturing. His tirades would have been wearisome if they weren’t studded with gems like “In the morning, all of Rome smells of coffee, which isn’t something that was cleverly planned,” or “New York is a cultural capital not because the best artists live there, but because the quickest critics do.”

Muschamp was the quickest of them all, the first and the most fearless when it came to debunking the hypocrisy of the architecture establishment. Toward the end of his tenure at the Times, people at dinner parties in Manhattan loved to trash his brilliant reviews. While defending him, I got into a number of ugly fights with individuals whose taste I otherwise held in high regard.

File Under Architecture revealed Muschamp’s uncanny ability to package his thoughts in a manner both seductive and provocative. As an object, the book is hard to put down. You want to caress it, pat it, fondle it. While its content might challenge your ability to sit still, its visual appeal will lull you into a gentle daze. You’ll read on, skipping paragraphs here and there yet unable to interrupt the movement of your eyes as they skim over the surface of the soft brown pages.

If you love books with footnotes, as I do, you’ll enjoy reading the work of Jonathan Crary. Footnotes are to books what lingerie is to clothes: the furtive underpinning of a narrative. Crary’s footnotes are chatty, gossipy and erudite. They are as fun to decipher as the text they annotate, and if you were to count the words, you’d find out that they are just as lengthy as the main document. Because of the footnotes, reading Crary’s books requires that you split your attention between the top and the bottom of each page, which is appropriate considering the subject matter of his dissertation: the history of human vision and the volatile role of attentiveness in Western culture.

ADD sufferers rejoice: according to Crary, attention deficit disorder is a social construction, not a medical condition.

Jonathan Crary is not Malcolm Gladwell. He is not a journalist, he is a scholar—a historian on the faculty at Columbia University. Quite inadvertently he got some exposure in the design community twenty years ago as one of the founders and co-editor of the Zone Books, famously designed by Bruce Mau.

A specialist at heart, he does not attempt to make his thoughts accessible to a large audience, an approach I find surprisingly refreshing, even though I often have to reread his paragraphs a couple of times to make sure that I understand what he means.

Luckily, the sort of attentiveness needed to follow his academic musings is exactly what he is talking about. As you watch your attention wax and wane, and try to rein in your mind in order to follow his reasoning, you are indeed engrossed in the act of “confronting and inhabiting the instability of perception itself.”

His first book, Techniques of the Observer, is considered a classic. Its cover features an anatomical drawing of a frightened patient whose eye is undergoing a surgical intervention, an image that dramatically illustrates Crary’s own probing into the various forms of inquiry that are at the origins of our visual culture. His account of how the concept of “paying attention” was manufactured in the 19th century challenges the assumption that being mentally focused is a natural state.

His second book, Suspensions of Perception, takes the argument further with a careful examination of the paintings of Edouard Manet, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne. He holds their work as evidence of a radical alteration in the way people perceived the visible world—a shift made necessary by the Industrial Revolution.

“Attention thus became an imprecise way of designating the relative capacity of a subject to selectively isolate certain contents of a sensory field at the expense of others in the interests of maintaining an orderly and productive world,” he wrote. In the age of 140-character twitters, his 600-character sentences read like epic narratives.

To appreciate Jonathan Crary’s writing, alternating between attention and distraction is best. If you give yourself permission to skip around his books and let your mind wander between the lines, you begin to experience “the dynamic oscillations of perceptual awareness,” and like Cézanne, you come to see “that the world can only be engaged as a process of becoming.”