The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

the starting point for becoming a good writer is to be a good reader

Strunk was born in 1869, and today’s writers cannot base their craft exclusively on the advice of a man who developed his sense of style before the invention of the telephone (let alone the Internet), before the advent of modern linguistics and cognitive science, before the wave of informalization that swept the world in the second half of the twentieth century.

That somewhere is the writing of other writers. Good writers are avid readers.