The Elements of Style

Based on Wikipedia: The Elements of Style

The Little Book That Ruled American Writing

Dorothy Parker, the sharp-tongued wit of the Algonquin Round Table, once offered this advice about a particular writing guide: "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."

That book—a slender volume barely thick enough to wedge a door—has probably shaped more American prose than any text since the King James Bible. Time magazine named it one of the hundred most influential nonfiction books in English since 1923. The Open Syllabus Project, after analyzing over a million college reading lists, found it to be the single most assigned text in American higher education.

All this from forty-three pages written by a Cornell professor in 1918.

The Professor Who Hated Wordiness

William Strunk Jr. taught English at Cornell University in the early twentieth century. He was a man with particular convictions about prose, and one conviction above all: writing should be clean. Strunk believed that clutter was the enemy of clarity, that unnecessary words were like barnacles on a ship's hull—they slowed everything down and looked ugly besides.

In 1918, he distilled his beliefs into a brief handbook for his students. The book contained eight rules of usage, ten principles of composition, some notes on form, forty-nine commonly misused expressions, and fifty-seven words people couldn't seem to spell. He had it privately printed in 1919, and Harcourt picked it up for wider publication in 1920.

The most famous commandment appears early: "Omit needless words."

Strunk elaborated on this with characteristic directness:

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.

Notice what Strunk is not saying. He's not demanding that every sentence be brief. He's demanding that every word earn its place. A long sentence full of necessary words is better than a short sentence with even one unnecessary one. The test isn't length—it's purpose.

Enter E.B. White

Strunk died in 1946. His little book might have died with him, a footnote in the history of Cornell's English department, had it not been for a former student named Elwyn Brooks White.

E.B. White went on to become one of the finest essayists in American letters. He wrote the "Talk of the Town" column for The New Yorker for decades. He also wrote Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, which means that generations of children encountered his prose before they knew what prose was.

In 1957, White rediscovered his old professor's book. He had forgotten about "the little book"—that "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English." Something about it moved him. He wrote about Strunk and his devotion to lucid prose in his New Yorker column, a kind of eulogy for a teacher eleven years dead.

Macmillan Publishing read that column and saw an opportunity. They commissioned White to revise and expand the book for modern readers.

The 1959 edition changed everything.

What White Added

White kept Strunk's rules largely intact but wrapped them in new material. He wrote an introduction based on his magazine piece about the professor. More significantly, he added a concluding chapter called "An Approach to Style"—a broader meditation on the craft of writing that went beyond grammar and usage into something approaching philosophy.

Where Strunk had been prescriptive and practical, White was warmer, more discursive. He advised writers to write to please themselves, to aim for what Robert Louis Stevenson called "one moment of felicity"—that instant when the words align perfectly with the thought.

The combination proved irresistible. The first edition sold about two million copies in 1959 alone. White revised it again in 1972 and 1979, eventually expanding it to eighty-five pages. More than ten million copies of the first three editions sold.

The book became known simply as "Strunk and White."

What the Book Actually Says

The third edition, published in 1979, contains fifty-four points organized into five chapters. There are eleven rules of punctuation and grammar. Eleven principles of writing. Eleven matters of form. A list of commonly misused words. And twenty-one reminders for achieving better style.

The reminders are where White's voice dominates. Number seventeen: "Omit needless words." That's Strunk. But number twenty-one—"Prefer the standard to the offbeat"—is pure White, a gentle nudge toward clarity over cleverness.

Some rules have aged with grace. "Use the active voice" remains sound advice. When you write "The ball was thrown by John," you're burying the actor at the end of the sentence. "John threw the ball" puts the doer first, where the reader expects to find them.

Other rules have required updating. The 1999 fourth edition quietly removed Strunk's advice to use masculine pronouns as the default. The original text had instructed writers that "he" could stand for any person "unless the antecedent is or must be feminine." The modern edition acknowledges that "many writers find the use of the generic he or his to rename indefinite antecedents limiting or offensive."

Even the punctuation of the authors' names changed. In editions before 1979, Strunk appeared as "Strunk Jr." with a comma—"Strunk, Jr." The later editions dropped the comma, following the book's own evolving recommendations about punctuating names.

The Case Against Strunk and White

Not everyone genuflects before this particular altar.

Geoffrey Pullum teaches linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and co-authored The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, a 1,842-page scholarly analysis of how English actually works. He has called The Elements of Style "the book that ate America's brain."

His critique is specific and damning:

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... 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 argues that Strunk and White fundamentally misunderstood some of what they proscribed. Take the passive voice. The book's most famous example of "passive" writing—"There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground"—isn't actually in the passive voice at all. The passive voice involves a specific grammatical construction where the object of an action becomes the subject of the sentence. "Lying on the ground" is a present participle, not a passive construction. Strunk apparently confused wordiness with passivity.

The split infinitive provides another example. "To boldly go where no man has gone before" splits the infinitive "to go" with the adverb "boldly." Strunk and White advised against this. But the prohibition has no historical or grammatical basis—it was invented by nineteenth-century grammarians who thought English should work more like Latin, where infinitives are single words and cannot be split. English is not Latin. "To boldly go" is perfectly grammatical English. It has been for centuries.

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

Why It Endures

So why does this zombie still walk among us?

Part of the answer is institutional momentum. When a book sits on a million syllabi, it develops a kind of gravitational pull. Professors assign it because they were assigned it. Students buy it because their professors require it. The cycle perpetuates itself.

But that explanation feels incomplete. Plenty of frequently assigned books fade from memory the moment the final exam ends. Strunk and White somehow persists.

Stephen King, in his memoir On Writing, offers a more personal endorsement: "There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. I'll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style."

Tim Skern, a biochemistry professor at the University of Vienna, argued in 2011 that it "remains the best book available on writing good English."

Perhaps the book endures because it makes writing feel possible. Most writing guides are either too technical (aimed at linguists) or too vague (write with passion! find your voice!). Strunk and White occupies a middle ground. It offers specific, memorable rules that a nervous undergraduate can actually follow. "Omit needless words" is actionable advice. You can look at a sentence and ask: does this word need to be here?

The rules may sometimes be wrong. But they give writers something to hold onto.

The Illustrated Edition and the Cantata

In 2005, the book received an unexpected visual treatment. The designer Maira Kalman created illustrations for a new edition—whimsical, colorful paintings that transformed the austere guide into something closer to an art book.

Kalman didn't stop there. She asked the composer Nico Muhly to write a cantata based on the book's text. A cantata is a vocal composition, typically with multiple movements, often set to religious or poetic texts. Setting a grammar handbook to music was a characteristically playful move. The piece was performed at the New York Public Library in October 2005.

Newsweek covered the event with the headline "The Elements of Style, the classic manual for clear writing, re-emerges as a hip new tome and an avant-garde musical piece."

Strunk, one suspects, would have found this excessive.

The Public Domain Question

Here's an interesting legal wrinkle. Strunk's original 1918 text has entered the public domain, meaning anyone can reprint it without permission or payment. Several publishers do exactly this, offering Strunk's original for a few dollars.

But White's additions—the introduction, the chapter on style, the revisions throughout—remain under copyright. So the "Strunk and White" everyone knows is still controlled by its publisher, while "Strunk" alone is free for the taking.

A programmer named John W. Cowan created his own revised edition based on Strunk's 1918 text, updating it for modern usage without any input from the White estate. It's available free online. Whether it captures the magic of the collaboration is another question.

A Lineage of Style

The Elements of Style didn't emerge from nowhere. It belongs to a tradition of usage guides stretching back at least to H.W. Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, published in 1926—eight years after Strunk's original pamphlet but long before White's revisions made it famous. Fowler was British, opinionated, and occasionally eccentric. He once devoted an entire entry to the question of whether one should write "unequal" or "inequal."

Sir Ernest Gowers contributed The Complete Plain Words in 1954, aimed primarily at British civil servants who had developed an allergy to comprehensible prose. (Government writing, it seems, has always suffered from the same disease.)

Joseph M. Williams published Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace in 1981, offering a more systematic approach to sentence construction than Strunk and White ever attempted.

The book also spawned imitators in other fields. The Elements of Programming Style applied Strunk's principles to computer code. The Elements of Typographic Style did the same for book design. The title format—"The Elements of X"—became a template for anyone hoping to borrow some reflected authority.

What to Make of It All

The Elements of Style is a book about writing clear prose. It has been praised by millions and attacked by experts. It contains genuine wisdom and demonstrable errors. It has shaped generations of American writers, for better or worse.

Perhaps the most honest assessment is this: the book is useful not because it's always right, but because it forces you to think about your choices. When you consider whether to use the active or passive voice, whether to cut a word or keep it, whether to split an infinitive or rearrange the sentence—you're engaging with your own prose in a way that casual writers never do.

The rules may be imperfect guides. But the habit of asking questions about your own writing? That's the real lesson.

Strunk put it simply: make every word tell.

Whether you follow his other advice is up to you.