| The Elements of Style | |
| Illustrator: | Maira Kalman (2005 only) |
| Country: | United States |
| Subject: | American English style guide |
| Media Type: | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages: | 43 (1918), 52 (1920), 71 (1959), 105 (1999) |
| Dewey: | 808/.042 21 |
| Congress: | PE1421 .S7 (Strunk) PE1408 .S772 (Strunk & White) |
| Oclc: | 27652766 |
The Elements of Style (also called Strunk & White) is a style guide for formal grammar used in American English writing. The first publishing was written 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 49 "words and expressions commonly misused," and a list of 57 "words often misspelled." Writer and editor E. B. White greatly enlarged and revised the book for publication by Macmillan in 1959. That was the first edition of the book, which Time recognized in 2011 as one of the 100 best and most influential non-fiction books written in English since 1923.[1]
American wit Dorothy Parker said, regarding the book:
Cornell University English professor William Strunk Jr. wrote The Elements of Style in 1918 and privately published it in 1919, for use at the university. Harcourt republished it in 52-page format in 1920. Strunk and editor Edward A. Tenney later revised it for publication as The Elements and Practice of Composition (1935). In 1957, the style guide reached the attention of E.B. White at The New Yorker. White 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 about Strunk's devotion to lucid English prose in his column.[2] [3]
Strunk died in 1946. Macmillan and Company 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 about two million copies in 1959. More than ten million copies of three editions were later sold.[4] Mark Garvey relates the history of the book in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style (2009).[5]
Maira Kalman, who provided the illustrations for The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005, see below), asked Nico Muhly to compose a cantata based on the book. It was performed at the New York Public Library in October 2005.[6] [7] [8]
Audiobook versions of The Elements now feature changed wording, citing "gender issues" with the original.[9]
Strunk concentrated on the cultivation of good writing and composition; the original 1918 edition exhorted writers to "omit needless words," use the active voice, and employ parallelism appropriately.[10]
The 1959 edition features White's expansions of preliminary sections, the "Introduction" essay (derived from his magazine story about 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 85 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, 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 it does stand as a discrete essay about writing lucid prose. To write well, White advises writers to have the proper mindset, that they write to please themselves, and that they aim for "one moment of felicity," a phrase by Robert Louis Stevenson.[11] Thus Strunk's 1918 recommendation:
Strunk Jr. no longer has a comma in his name in the 1979 and later editions, due to the modernized style recommendation about punctuating such names.
The fourth edition of The Elements of Style (2000), published 54 years after Strunk's death, omits his stylistic advice about masculine pronouns: "unless the antecedent is or must be feminine".[12] In its place, the following sentence has been added: "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".[13] [14]
Components new to the fourth edition include a foreword by essayist 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 (2005), with illustrations by the designer Maira Kalman. This edition excludes the afterword by Osgood and restores the first edition chapter on spelling.
The Elements of Style was listed as one of the 100 best and most influential non-fiction books written in English since 1923 by Time in its 2011 list.[1] 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."[15]
In On Writing (2000, p. 11), Stephen King writes: "There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. (Of course, it's short; at eighty-five pages it's much shorter than this one.) I'll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style. Rule 17 in the chapter titled Principles of Composition is 'Omit needless words.' I will try to do that here."
In 2011, University of Vienna professor in biochemistry Tim Skern argued in Writing Scientific English: A Workbook that The Elements of Style "remains the best book available on writing good English".[16]
In 2013, Nevile Gwynne reproduced The Elements of Style in his work Gwynne's Grammar. Britt Peterson of The Boston Globe wrote that his inclusion of the book was a "curious addition".[17]
In 2016, the Open Syllabus Project[18] lists The Elements of Style as the most frequently assigned text in US academic syllabuses, based on an analysis of 933,635 texts appearing in over 1 million syllabuses.[19]
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 the University of Edinburgh, and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), said that:
Pullum has argued, 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. On Language Log, a blog about language written by linguists, he further criticized The Elements of Style for promoting linguistic prescriptivism and hypercorrection among Anglophones, and called it "the book that ate America's brain".[20]
Jan Freeman, reviewing for The Boston Globe in 2005 described the latest edition of The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005), 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".[21]
(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.)
Several books were titled paying homage to Strunk's, for example: