The Elements of Style

The Elements of Style

Cover of 4th ed. (paperback, 2000)
Author	William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White
Language	English
Subject	Style guide
Publisher	Pearson Education Company
Publication date	1919, 1959
Publication place	USA
Media type	Paperback book
Pages	105
ISBN	020530902X
OCLC	45802070
Dewey Decimal	808/.042 21
LC Class	PE1408 .S772 1999

The Elements of Style (1918) (aka Strunk & White), by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, is an American English writing style guide. It is one of the best-known and most influential prescriptive treatment of English grammar and usage, and often is required reading in U.S. high school and university composition classes. The original, 1918 edition of The Elements of Style detailed eight elementary rules of usage, ten elementary principles of composition, “a few matters of form”, and a list of commonly misused words and expressions.

History

Cornell University professor of English William Strunk, Jr., wrote The Elements of Style in 1918, privately published it in 1919, and first revised it in 1935, assisted by editor Edward A. Tenney. In 1957, at The New Yorker magazine, the style guide reached the attention of writer E. B. White, who had studied writing under Strunk in 1919, but had since forgotten the "little book" that he described as a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English".

Weeks later, he wrote a feature story lauding the professor’s devotion to lucid written English prose. Meantime, Macmillan and Company publishers had commissioned White to revise The Elements of Style, then forty-one years old, for a 1959 edition — because Strunk had died thirteen years earlier, in 1946. His expansion and modernization of the 1935 revised edition yielded the new writing style manual — since known as Strunk & White — whose first revised edition sold some two million copies. Since 1959, the total sales of three editions of the book, in four decades, exceeded ten million copies.

In the 1918 original edition, Strunk concentrates upon specific questions of usage, the cultivation of good writing, and avoiding overwriting, by recommending: "Make every word tell". One composition principle, the 17th, is the simple instruction: "Omit needless words." The 1959 edition features White’s updated expansions of those sections, the "Introduction" essay (derived from his Strunk feature story), and the concluding chapter, "An Approach to Style", a broader, prescriptive guide to writing in English.

Later, E.B. White updated the second (1972) and third (1979) editions of The Elements of Style, by which time it had grown to 85 pages. By publication of the fourth edition in 1999, though, the second author of Strunk and White had been dead fourteen years, since 1985. The fourth edition omits Strunk's advice to use masculine pronouns "unless the antecedent is or must be feminine", noting that "many writers find the use of the generic he ... limiting or offensive". It provides additional advice for avoiding an "unintentional emphasis on the masculine" in the renamed entry “They. He or She.” in Chapter IV: Misused Words and Expressions.

Then the Longman publishing company bought the rights to Strunk & White, and incorporated a foreword by Roger Angell (E.B. White’s stepson), an afterword by Charles Osgood, a glossary, and an index. Moreover, in 2005, The Elements of Style Illustrated, designed and illustrated by Maira Kalman containing the 1999 edition text, was published.

Contents overview — the Third Edition

The third edition of The Elements of Style (1979) features fifty-four points, a list of common word usage errors; eleven rules of punctuation and grammar; eleven principles of writing; eleven matters of form; and twenty-one reminders for a better style, in Chapter V, which White wrote alone. Moreover, the final reminder, the 21st, “Prefer the standard to the offbeat” reads like a discrete essay. To writers, White advises the proper mind-set, urging they write to please themselves, and to aim for, in the phrase of Robert Louis Stevenson, “one moment of felicity”.

Criticism

Edinburgh University linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum has criticized The Elements of Style, saying:

The book’s toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules . . . It’s sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write 'however' or 'than me' or 'was' or 'which,' but can’t tell you why.

Specifically, Pullum says Strunk and White were misguided in identifying the passive voice as incorrect, and in proscribing established usages such as the split infinitive and the use of "which" in a restrictive relative clause. He also frequently criticizes Elements on Language Log, a linguists' blog focusing on portrayals of language in the popular media, for promoting linguistic prescriptivism and hypercorrection among English speakers, referring to it as "the book that ate America's brain".

On the other hand, commentators have expressed that "Pullum's take on Strunk and White involves a significant degree of distortion and plain misreading" that "involve a fair amount of harumphing," citing numerous examples of such mischaracterizations. At least one commentator suggests that Pullum will never be regarded as being in the same or superior category as Strunk ("I take comfort that no one will remember this harumphing guy in 10 minutes, anyway."). Id.

The Boston Globe's review of the 2005 illustrated edition describes it as an "aging zombie of a book ... a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice."

Editions in print

• The Elements of Style (1999), 4th edition, hardcover, ISBN 0-205-31342-6
• The Elements of Style (2000), 4th edition, paperback, ISBN 0-205-30902-X
• The Elements of Style: A Style Guide for Writers (2005), by William Strunk, ISBN 0-97522-980-X
• The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005), by William Strunk Jr., E.B. White and Maira Kalman (Illustrator), ISBN 1-59420-069-6
• The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. & How To Speak And Write Correctly, by Joseph Devlin (2006), BN Publishing, ISBN 956-291-263-9
• The Elements of Style Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (2009), hardcover, ISBN 0-978-0-205-63264-0 (contains the 4th edition text)

See also

• A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
• The Complete Plain Words

External links

• The Elements of Style: Full text of Strunk's 1918 edition (visited 11 October 2008)
• The Elements of Style: Full text of Strunk's 1918 edition (visited 11 October 2008)
• The Elements of Style as an operatic play
• NPR radio piece discussing illustrated Strunk & White book and musical adaptation.