The Elements of Style

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

Template:Styles The Elements of Style (1918), also known as Strunk & White, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White, is a prescriptive American English writing style guide 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".

In 2011, Time magazine placed the book in of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.

History

Cornell University professor of English William Strunk, Jr., wrote The Elements of Style in 1918, and privately published it in 1919, for in-house use at university; later, for publication, he and editor Edward A. Tenney revised it as The Elements and Practice of Composition (1935). Twenty-two years later, 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, White wrote a feature story lauding Prof. Strunk's devotion to lucid English prose.

Meantime, Macmillan and Company publishers had commissioned White to revise the forty-one year old text of The Elements of Style (1918) for a 1959 edition, because Strunk had died 1946. White's expansion and modernization of Strunk's 1935 revised edition yielded a writing style manual informally known as Strunk & White, which first edition (1959) sold approximately two million copies; in the four ensuing decades, more than ten million copies, of the three editions, have been sold. Furthermore, the history of this writing manual is told in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style (2009), by Mark Garvey.

Content

In The Elements of Style (1918), as a professor of English, William Strunk concentrated upon 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 (derived from his magazine feature story about Prof. Strunk), and the concluding chapter, "An Approach to Style", a broader, prescriptive guide to writing in English. He also produced the second (1972) and third (1979) editions of The Elements of Style, by which time the book's length had extended to eighty-five pages.

The third edition 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 21 reminders for a better style, in Chapter V. 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 (1850–94); thus the professor'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 every word tell.

—

The fourth edition of The Elements of Style (2000), published fifty-four years after the death of William Strunk, Jr., omits his stylistic advice about masculine pronouns: "unless the antecedent is or must be feminine"; and, 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." In Chapter IV: Misused Words and Expressions, the re-titled entry, "They. He or She" further advises avoiding an "unintentional emphasis on the masculine". The textual expansions 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 was re-published as The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005), by the designer Maira Kalman.

Criticism

Europe

Geoffrey Pullum, professor of linguistics at Edinburgh University, and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), criticized The Elements of Style, because:

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, Prof. Pullum said that Strunk and White misunderstood what constitutes the passive voice, and criticized their proscribing of popular established 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 linguists' weblog about language usage in the popular media, for promoting linguistic prescriptivism and hypercorrection among Anglophones, calling it "the book that ate America's brain".

North America

The Boston Globe newspaper book review of The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005) edition described the writing manual 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

• 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 0-9752298-0-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 0-205-63264-5 (contains the 4th edition text)

Parodies

• Baker, Chris; Jacob Hansen (2011). The Elements of F*cking Style: A Helpful Parody. St Martin's Griffin. ISBN 031258377X. http://theelementsoffuckingstyle.com/. 

See also

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

External links

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• 1,2 The Elements of Style: Full text of Strunk's 1918 edition (visited 09 February 2010)
• The Elements of Style as an operatic play
• NPR radio piece discussing illustrated Strunk & White book and musical adaptation.
• The Elements of Style: The LibriVox audiobook version of Strunk's 1918 edition