Beyond the Elements of Style

As most of you know, this blog aims to go somewhere “beyond” The Elements of Style, but it’s also worth taking a look—not back, perhaps, but over, at the real, the original Elements, which has gotten a fair amount of bad press.

When Prof. Strunk wrote it in 1919, the book was controversial. Remember that the style du jour was Bulwer Lytton, a high Victorian style that did in fact obsfucate meaning more often than it revealed it. What detractors don’t realize is that a good feal of the clear writing to which our generations have become accustomed is thanks to Strunk and White. If you are reasonably proficient in English, you probably can get by without it; but if it hadn’t been for the Elements, as my friend and colleage Dick Margulis has said, “we might still be thrashing our way through dense, convoluted, triple-canopy rainforest prose with machetes.”

In its historic context, it was an important book. Perhaps it is less important now, but it still is a reasonable guide for those who do not have a strong background in English.

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What about that historical context? A bit of history from Wikipedia:

Cornell University English professor William Strunk, Jr., wrote The Elements of Style in 1918, privately published it in 1919, and first revised it in 1935 with editor Edward A. Tenney. 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, he wrote a feature story lauding the professor’s devotion to lucid written English prose. Meantime, Macmillan and Company publishers had commissioned White to revise The Elements of Style, then 41 years old, for a 1959 edition, because Strunk had died 13 years earlier, in 1946. His expansion and modernization of the 1935 revised edition yielded the new writing style manual, since known as Strunk & White, whose first revised edition sold some two million copies. Since 1959 the total sales of three editions of the book, in four decades, exceeded ten million copies.

In the 1918 original edition Strunk concentrates upon specific questions of usage and the cultivation of good writing by recommending: “Make every word tell.” One composition principle, the 17th, is the simple instruction: “Omit needless words.” The 1959 edition features White’s updated expansions of those sections, the “Introduction” essay (derived from his Strunk feature story), and the concluding chapter, “An Approach to Style,” a broader, prescriptive guide to writing in English.

Later, E.B. White updated the second (1972) and third (1979) editions of The Elements of Style, by which time it had grown to 85 pages. By publication of the fourth edition in 1999 the second author of Strunk and White had been dead 14 years, since 1985.

The fourth edition omits Strunk’s advice to use masculine pronouns “unless the antecedent is or must be feminine”, noting that “many writers find the use of the generic he … limiting or offensive.” It provides additional advice for avoiding an “unintentional emphasis on the masculine” in the renamed entry “They. He or She.” in Chapter IV: Misused Words and Expressions.

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Many of my own students and clients (and you know who you are) start out with their writing really needing to find the clarity of thought and expression that is advocated in Strunk and White … there is a sense in many beginners that florid writing and literary writing are one and the same, and it takes a bit of unlearning to understand what we were first told in 1919: “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.”

Let every word you use tell. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!