Word: strunk
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Vigorous writing is concise," writes William Strunk in his classic Elements of Style. "This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short...but that every word tell." The sound bite is the ultimate in making every word tell. It is the very soul of compactness. Brevity is not enough. You need weight. Hence some sound bites qualify for greatness: F.D.R.'s "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" or Reagan's "Tear down this wall." Others--"a bridge to the 21st century"--are just short and gaseous...
...Rebecca Strunk suffered increasing discomfort as she lay recovering from a hysterectomy at the Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. Again and again, the 46-year-old mother of two complained of pain in her upper abdomen, and again and again the people who came into her room to care for her wrote down "incisional pain" on her chart, although the incision was in her lower abdomen. Finally, after three days, as her temperature spiked and her blood pressure plummeted, Strunk's doctors suspected the truth: her bowel had been nicked in the surgery, and she was succumbing to a massive...
Some 20,000 patients are killed every year by infections they pick up in America's hospitals. What made Strunk's case particularly significant was her husband's contention that Strunk died largely because the hospital staff members to whom she described her distress were not registered nurses but "patient-care technicians" who lacked the expertise to interpret her complaints. In 1994, the year of Strunk's operation, the Christ Hospital had turned to what management consultants call "patient-focused care," a system in which such bedside tasks as taking vital signs and answering call buttons are performed by unlicensed...
...Salvation Army. He had $10 left. He got the teenagers enrolled at Mount Anthony High School. An adviser there helped him with college applications. His English was shaky, but Bennington College gave him a full scholarship. He studied English and American literature: The Waste Land, Dover Beach, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. He read Shakespeare and daydreamed about writing books. When he graduated after three years, he had managed to write, in formal and rather literary English, the first draft of a haunting memoir of his youth in Vietnam...