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.