The Elements of Style
The most influential short book on English prose. Strunk wrote it as a pamphlet for his Cornell students in 1918; E. B.
White revised and expanded it in 1959 and the little book has not stopped being read since.
The advice is simple and sometimes too forceful ("omit needless words") but the orientation is what matters: prose is a tool, not an art object, and the writer's job is to stay out of the reader's way.
For product direction it is the fastest education in the writing style that almost all technical and business communication aspires to.
Short enough to reread every year; most people should.
Central argument
Strunk and White argue that effective prose is defined not by ornamentation or personal voice but by discipline and restraint — the writer's primary obligation is to the reader's comprehension, not self-expression. The central rules follow from this: prefer the active voice, use definite concrete language, and above all omit needless words. Good writing, in their view, is not an aesthetic achievement but an act of service; clarity is not a stylistic option but a moral obligation to the reader's time and attention.
Critique
The book's prescriptivism has aged unevenly — several rules ('do not begin a sentence with however', 'avoid the passive') are stated as absolutes when they are actually context-dependent preferences rooted in mid-20th-century American editorial taste rather than demonstrated cognitive or communicative principles. More substantively, the framework assumes a single, idealized reader and a single register of formal written English, which makes it poorly equipped to handle the plurality of voices, cultural contexts, and communicative modes that characterize contemporary professional writing. A thoughtful reader will benefit from the orientation while recognizing that the specific rules require judgment to apply, not simple obedience.
Why it matters for product
Product leaders produce an underestimated volume of consequential prose — strategy documents, PRDs, OKRs, roadmap narratives, hiring briefs — and the quality of that writing directly determines whether alignment is achieved or merely assumed; Strunk and White's core discipline of omitting needless words maps directly onto the problem of bloated product documentation that obscures decisions rather than recording them. More specifically, the principle that prose is a tool for the reader rather than an expression of the writer applies with force to how CPOs frame product direction to engineering, design, and commercial teams: the question is never whether the document reflects the author's thinking accurately, but whether it produces the right action in the reader.