The Elements of Style also known as
Strunk & White, by William Strunk, Jr. and
E. B. WhiteElwyn Brooks White , usually known as E. B. White, was an American writer. A long-time contributor to The New Yorker magazine, he also wrote many famous books for both adults and children, such as the popular Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, and co-authored a widely used writing guide, The...
, is a
prescriptiveIn linguistics, prescription denotes normative practices on such aspects of language use as spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and syntax. It includes judgments on what usages are socially proper and politically correct...
American EnglishAmerican English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....
writing
style guideA style guide or style manual is a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization or field...
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,
TimeTime is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine listed the writing style-guide as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.
History
Cornell UniversityCornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
professor of English 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 (1935). Twenty-two years later, in 1957, at
The New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
magazine, the style guide reached the attention of
E. B. WhiteElwyn Brooks White , usually known as E. B. White, was an American writer. A long-time contributor to The New Yorker magazine, he also wrote many famous books for both adults and children, such as the popular Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, and co-authored a widely used writing guide, The...
, 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- Published Features & news :While the distinction between published features and news is often clear, when approached conceptually there are few hard boundaries between the two. It is quite possible to write a feature in the style of a news story, for instance...
about Professor Strunk's devotion to lucid English prose.
Macmillan and Company publishers subsequently commissioned White to revise the forty-one year old text of
The Elements of Style (1918) for a 1959 edition, because Strunk had died in 1946. White's expansion and modernization of Strunk'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 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 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 (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 of
The Elements of Style (1979) 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 StevensonRobert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
(1850–94); thus the professor's 1918 recommendation:
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 AngellRoger Angell is an American essayist. He has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was its chief fiction editor for many years...
, stepson of E.B. White, an afterword by the American cultural commentator
Charles OsgoodCharles Osgood is a radio and television commentator in the United States. His daily program, The Osgood File, has been broadcast on the CBS Radio Network since 1971. He is also known for being the voice of the narrator of Horton Hears a Who!, an animated film released in 2008, based on the book...
, 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 KalmanMaira Kalman, born in 1949, is an American illustrator, author, artist, and designer. Born in Tel Aviv, Kalman came to New York City with her family at age 4. She attended the High School of Music and Art, now LaGuardia High School....
.
Criticism
In criticizing
The Elements of Style,
Geoffrey PullumGeoffrey Keith "Geoff" Pullum is a British-American linguist specialising in the study of English. , he is Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh....
, professor of
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
at
Edinburgh UniversityThe University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...
, and co-author of
The Cambridge Grammar of the English LanguageThe Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is a book that presents a comprehensive descriptive grammar of English. Its primary authors are Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. It was published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, in 2002.-Reviews:* Aarts, Bas. . Grammatici certant...
(2002), said that: Specifically, Pullum said that the authors misunderstood what constitutes the
passive voiceThe passive voice is a grammatical construction in which the subject of a sentence or clause denotes the recipient of the action rather than the performer...
, and criticized their proscription of established popular usages, such as the
split infinitiveA split infinitive is an English-language grammatical construction in which a word or phrase, usually an adverb or adverbial phrase, comes between the marker to and the bare infinitive form of a verb....
and the use of
which in a restrictive relative clause. He further criticized
The Elements of Style in
Language LogLanguage Log is a collaborative language blog maintained by University of Pennsylvania phonetician Mark Liberman.The site is updated daily at the whims of the contributors, and most of the posts are on language use in the media and popular culture. Google search results are frequently used as a...
, a linguists' log about language usage in the popular media, for promoting linguistic prescriptivism and
hypercorrectionIn linguistics or usage, hypercorrection is a non-standard usage that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of grammar or a usage prescription...
among Anglophones, and called it "the book that ate America's brain".
The
Boston Globe review described
The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005), 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".
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)
External links
- 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
LibriVox is an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers and is probably, since 2007, the world's most prolific audiobook publisher...
audiobook version of Strunk's 1918 edition