poor lonesome boy is absolutely right. Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is basic and essential.

On the principle that most good writing occurs after you get your first draft finished, I've found Getting the Words Right: How to Revise, Edit, and Rewrite by Theodore A. Rees Cheney to be a great help. He takes it all the way from when to dump a whole chapter ("kill your darlings") down to how to tighten up and clarify a sentence.

A good dictionary and a good thesaurus are basic necessities, as is a good style manual. (The Chicago Style Manual seems to be the accepted standard. I've also found that The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage clears up a lot of questions about a lot of odds and ends, such as "do I capitalize this, put it in quotes, or italicize it?" The Random House Word Menu is a good one to have when you can think of the approximate word, but it isn't quite what you want. It gives you lists of words with similar meanings but different nuances. Very helpful.

One of my prized and most valuable possessions is a little book called Power and Polish: Writing with a Word Processor by Annie Stewart. She's a local (Seattle) writer, and I think she self-published this. It's sixty-four pages and saddle stapled like a magazine. Published in 1987 by Jugum Press, P. O. Box 95916, Seattle, WA 98145-2916 (although I don't guarantee that this is still current or that the little book is still available). It's not a computer manual (much of what she says is obsolete but still useful), it deals with ways to use the features of a word processor to edit, tighten, and clean up your writing. Another excellent book along the same line is Improve Your Writing with a Word Processor by David F. and Virginia Noble, Que Corporation, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1984. Once again, I don't know if it can be found at all, and the computer information is way out of date, but it has some really ingenious ways of using the features of a word processor (any word processor) to improve your writing. The "blockbuster" macro itself is worth the price of admission.

But if the Gods of Quill and Scroll will allow you only two books, make one a good dictionary and the other The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.

Don Firth