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. —William Strunk, Jr.
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Elements of Style
The Elements of Style (a.k.a. “Strunk & White”) is an American English writing style guide. It is one of the most influential and best-known prescriptive treatments of English grammar and usage in the United States. It originally detailed eight elementary rules of usage, ten elementary principles of composition, “a few matters of form,” and a list of commonly misused words and expressions. Updated editions of the paperback book are often required reading for American high school and college composition classes.
History of The Elements of Style
The book was originally written in 1918 and privately published by Cornell University professor William Strunk Jr. and was first revised with the help of Edward A. Tenny in 1935. In 1957, it came to the attention of E. B. White at The New Yorker. White studied under Strunk in 1919 but had forgotten the “little book,” a “forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.” A few weeks later, White wrote a piece for The New Yorker lauding Professor Strunk and his devotion to “lucid” English prose. Because the book's original author had died in 1946, Macmillan and Company commissioned White to recast a new edition of The Elements of Style, which was published in 1959. In this revision, White independently expanded and modernized the 1918 work and created “Strunk & White.” White's first edition sold some two million copies, and the first three editions totaled ten million over a span of four decades.
Strunk's original version concentrated on specific questions of usage, cultivating what he considered good writing and avoiding prolixities: “Make every word tell." White updated and extended these sections, and he prefixed an introductory essay adapted from his New Yorker article. He also added the concluding chapter, “An Approach to Style,” a broader prescriptive guide to writing in English. White updated two more editions of The Elements of Style in 1972 and 1979, when it grew to 85 pages. By the time the fourth edition of “Strunk and White” appeared in 1999, its second author had died, and the manuscript rights were acquired by Longman, who added a foreword by White's stepson, Roger Angell, an afterword by Charles Osgood, a glossary, and an index. An anonymous editor modified the text of this 1999 edition. Among other changes, he or she removed White's spirited defense of “he” for nouns embracing both genders. See the “they” entry in Chapter IV and also gender-specific pronouns.
The year 2005 saw the release of The Elements of Style Illustrated, with design and illustrations by Maira Kalman. The text follows the 1999 edition.
Contents of The Elements of Style
The rules can themselves be listed quite easily, though much of the value of the text is not only in the rules themselves but in Strunk and White's explanations and their copious (and humorous) examples.
I. Elementary rules of usage
- Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's.
- In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.
- Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas.
- Place a comma before 'and' or 'but' introducing an independent clause.
- Do not join independent clauses by a comma.
- Do not break sentences in two.
- A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.
- Divide words at line-ends, in accordance with their formation and pronunciation.
II. Elementary principles of composition
- Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one paragraph to each topic.
- As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic sentence; end it in conformity with the beginning.
- Use the active voice.
- Put statements in positive form.
- Omit needless words.
- Avoid a succession of loose sentences.
- Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form.
- Keep related words together.
- In summaries, keep to one tense.
- Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.
III. A Few Matters of Form
- Addresses colloquialisms, exclamations, headings, the hyphen, margins, numerals, parentheses, quotations, references, syllabication, and titles.
IV. Words and Expressions Commonly Misused
- Includes aggravate, irritate; all right; allude; allusion; alternate, alternative; among, between; and/or; anticipate; anybody; anyone; as good or better than; as to whether; as yet; being; but; can; care less; case; certainly; character; claim (verb); clever; compare; comprise; consider; contact; cope; currently; data; different from; disinterested; divided into; due to; each and every one; effect; enormity; enthuse; etc.; fact; facility; factor; farther, further; feature; finalize; fix; flammable; folk; fortuitous; get; gratuitous; he is a man who; hopefully; however; illusion; imply, infer; importantly; in regard to; in the last analysis; inside of, inside; insightful; in terms of; interesting; irregardless; -ize; kind of; lay vs lie; leave; less; like; line, along these lines; literal, literally; loan vs lend; meaningful; memento; most; nature; nauseous, nauseated; nice; nor; noun used as a verb; offputting, ongoing; one; one of the most; -oriented; partially; participle for verbal noun; people; personalize; personally; possess; presently; prestigious; refer; regretful; relate; respective, respectively; secondly, thirdly, etc.; shall, will; so; sort of; split infinitive; state; student body; than; thanking you in advance; that, which; the foreseeable future; the truth is, the fact is; they, he or she; this; thrust; tortuous, torturous; transpire; try; type; unique; utilize; verbal; very; while; -wise; worthwhile; and would.
V. An Approach to Style (With a List of Reminders)
- Place yourself in the background.
- Write in a way that comes naturally.
- Work from a suitable design.
- Write with nouns and verbs.
- Revise and rewrite.
- Do not overwrite.
- Do not overstate.
- Avoid the use of qualifiers.
- Do not affect a breezy manner.
- Use orthodox spelling.
- Do not explain too much.
- Do not construct awkward adverbs.
- Make sure the reader knows who is speaking.
- Avoid fancy words.
- Do not use dialect unless your ear is good.
- Be clear.
- Do not inject opinion.
- Use figures of speech sparingly.
- Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity.
- Avoid foreign languages.
- Prefer the standard to the offbeat.
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