The Element Of Style by Wililam Strunk Jr.

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. Some of Strunk’s wisdom is still chiefly revered in the US, but his explication of the nature and beauty of brevity is almost poetic: “vigorous writing is concise. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times.”Īs Lewis Carroll once observed, “What I tell you three times is true.” The Elements of Style is replete with many timeless truths about modern English usage, truths that have trickled down into the literary consciousness of many generations of journalists and writers. In the New Yorker of 1957, addressing the task he had undertaken, EB White recalled that when, in college, “I was sitting in class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having short-changed himself – a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock.

“Strunk & White”, a title routinely chosen as one of the most influential books ever written in English, was ready to take its place in the front line of the ongoing battle to save the language from corruption, marching to war against the horrors of jargon, prolixity and grammatical solecism beneath a banner inscribed with one simple slogan: “Omit needless words”. White added his own chapter “on writing” – about English prose composition, and that was that. “Seven rules of usage, 11 principles of composition, a few matters of form, and a list of words and expressions commonly misused – that was the sum and substance of Professor Strunk’s work.” After half a century, he conceded, it was still “a barely tarnished gem”, so little broken that it barely required fixing. In its original, privately printed guise, The Elements of Style was a 43-page summary of, in White’s words, “the case for cleanliness, accuracy and brevity in the use of English”. It won’t teach you to write, but it will make what you do write a lot more readable, vigorous, and persuasive

In Britain, whose relationship to the English language has been more mandarin, the equivalent title is HW Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926). Those are the words of EB White, who, having been taught English at Cornell University by Prof William Strunk Jr, was commissioned in 1957 by the publishers Macmillan to revise Strunk’s privately printed course book on style for the general reader as well as the college market.

The Element Of Style by Wililam Strunk Jr.