The Elements of Style is a prescriptive American English writing style guide in numerous editions.
The original was composed by William Strunk, Jr., in 1918 and published by Harcourt in
1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage", ten "elementary principles of composition",
"a few matters of form", a list of forty-nine "words and expressions commonly misused",
and a list of fifty-seven "words often misspelled".
It was much enlarged and revised by E.B.
White for publication by Macmillan in 1959.
That was the first edition of so-called Strunk & White, which Time magazine named in 2011
one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.
History Cornell University English professor William
Strunk, Jr., wrote The Elements of Style in 1918, and privately published it in 1919 for
in-house use at the university.
Later, for publication, he and editor Edward A. Tenney revised it as The Elements and Practice
of Composition.
In 1957, at The New Yorker, the style guide reached the attention of 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, White wrote a feature story about Strunk's devotion to lucid English prose.
Macmillan and Company publishers subsequently commissioned White to revise The Elements
for a 1959 edition.
White's expansion and modernization of Strunk and Tenney's 1935 revised edition yielded
the writing style manual informally known as Strunk & White, the first edition of which
sold approximately two million copies in 1959.
In the ensuing four decades, more than ten million copies of three editions have been
sold.
The history of this writing manual is told by Mark Garvey in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive
History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style.
Maira Kalman, who provided the illustrations for The Elements of Style Illustrated, asked
Nico Muhly to compose a cantata based on the book.
It was performed at the New York Public Library in October 2005.
Content In The Elements of Style, William Strunk concentrated
on specific questions of usage—and the cultivation of good writing—with the recommendation
"Make every word tell"; hence, the 17th principle of composition is the simple instruction:
"Omit needless words."
The 1959 edition features White's expansions of those sections, the "Introduction" essay,
and the concluding chapter, "An Approach to Style", a broader, prescriptive guide to writing
in English.
He also produced the second and third editions of The Elements of Style, by which time the
book's length had extended to eighty-five pages.
The third edition of The Elements of Style features 54 points: a list of common word-usage
errors; 11 rules of punctuation and grammar; 11 principles of writing; 11 matters of form;
and, in Chapter V, 21 reminders for better style.
The final reminder, the 21st, "Prefer the standard to the offbeat", is thematically
integral to the subject of The Elements of Style, yet does stand as a discrete essay
about writing lucid prose.
To write well, White advises writers to have the proper mind-set, that they write to please
themselves, and that they aim for "one moment of felicity", a phrase by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Thus Strunk's 1918 recommendation:
Vigorous writing is concise.
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for
the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary
parts.
This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all
detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.
The fourth edition of The Elements of Style, published fifty-four years after Strunk's
death, omits his stylistic advice about masculine pronouns: "unless the antecedent is or must
be feminine".
In its place, editor E.B.
White reports: "Currently, however, many writers find the use of the generic he or his to rename
indefinite antecedents limiting or offensive."
Further, the re-titled entry "They.
He or She", in Chapter IV: Misused Words and Expressions, advises the writer to avoid an
"unintentional emphasis on the masculine".
Components new to the fourth edition include a foreword by Roger Angell, stepson of E.B.
White, an afterword by the American cultural commentator Charles Osgood, a glossary, and
an index.
Five years later, the fourth edition text was re-published as The Elements of Style
Illustrated, by the designer Maira Kalman.
Beside its new illustration by Kalman, this edition excludes the afterword by Charles
Osgood and restores the first edition chapter on spelling.
Reception The Elements of Style was listed as one of
the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923 by Time in their 2011
list.
Upon its release Charles Poor writing for The New York Times called it "a splendid trophy
for all who are interested in reading and writing."
American poet Dorothy Parker once proclaimed, "If you have any young friends who aspire
to become writers the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies
of The Elements of Style.
The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy."
Criticism of Strunk & White has largely focused on claims that it has a prescriptivist nature,
or that it has become a general anachronism in the face of modern English usage.
In criticizing The Elements of Style, Geoffrey Pullum, professor of linguistics at Edinburgh
University, and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, said that:
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.
Pullum has demonstrated, for example, that the authors misunderstood what constitutes
the passive voice, and he criticized their proscription of established and unproblematic
English usages, such as the split infinitive and the use of which in a restrictive relative
clause.
He further criticized The Elements of Style in Language Log, a blog written by linguists
about language, for promoting linguistic prescriptivism and hypercorrection among Anglophones, and
called it "the book that ate America's brain".
The Boston Globe's review described The Elements of Style Illustrated, with illustrations by
Maira Kalman, as an "aging zombie of a book ... a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves
jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice".
In 2011, Tim Skern wrote that The Elements of Style "remains the best book available
on writing good English".
Editions Strunk
The Elements of Style, William Strunk, New York: Harcourt – 52-page publication of
the original composed in 1918 and privately printed in 1919.
(Because the text of Strunk's original is now in the public domain and freely available
on the Internet, publishers can and do reprint it in book form.)
Strunk & White The Elements of Style, fourth edition, hardcover,
ISBN 0-205-31342-6 The
Elements of Style, fourth edition, paperback, ISBN 0-205-30902-X
The Elements of Style Illustrated, by William Strunk, E.B.
White and Maira Kalman, ISBN 1-594-20069-6 The Elements of Style Fiftieth Anniversary
Edition, hardcover, ISBN 0-205-63264-5 Strunk & Cowan
The Elements of Style, home.ccil.org/~cowan.
Cowan writes: "My revisions to the original are founded on the principle that rules of
usage and style cannot be drawn out of thin air, nor constructed a priori according to
'logic'; they must depend on the actual practice of those who are generally acknowledged to
be good writers."
See also A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
The Complete Plain Words Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
Several books were titled paying homage to Strunk's, for example:
The Elements of Typographic Style The Elements of Programming Style
The Elements of C++ Style References
External links The Elements of Style
Strunk at Project Gutenberg Strunk at Wikisource
Strunk, audio version at LibriVox Strunk & Cowan
The Elements of Style as an operatic play at the Wayback Machine.
NPR radio piece discussing illustrated Strunk & White book and musical adaptation.
Catherine Prendergast: "The Fighting Style: Reading the Unabomber’s Strunk and White",
College English, Volume 72, Number 1, September 2009.