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The Elements of Style

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The Elements of Style  
Elements of Style cover.jpg
Cover of 4th ed. (paperback, 2000)
Author William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White
Country USA
Language English
Subject(s) Style guide
Publisher Pearson Education Company
Publication date 1919, 1959
Media type Paperback book
Pages 105
ISBN 020530902X
OCLC Number 45802070
Dewey Decimal 808/.042 21
LC Classification PE1408 .S772 1999
Style guides

The Elements of Style (1918) (aka Strunk & White), by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, is a prescriptive American English writing style guide 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".

Contents

History

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".[1]

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.[2]

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."[3] 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",[4] noting that "many writers find the use of the generic he ... limiting or offensive".[5] It provides additional advice for avoiding an "unintentional emphasis on the masculine"[6] in the renamed entry “They. He or She.” in Chapter IV: Misused Words and Expressions.[7]

Then, the Longman publishing company bought the rights to Strunk & White, and incorporated a foreword by Roger Angell (E.B. White’s stepson), an afterword by Charles Osgood, a glossary and an index. In 2005, the 1999 edition was published as The Elements of Style Illustrated, designed and illustrated by Maira Kalman.

The Third Edition (1979)

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 a discrete essay. [8] E.B. White advises writers to have the proper mind-set, that they write to please themselves, and to aim for, in the phrase of Robert Louis Stevenson, “one moment of felicity”.

“ 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. The Elements of Style.[9] ”

Criticism

In criticizing The Elements of Style, Edinburgh University linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum said:

The book’s toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules . . . It’s sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write however or than me or was or which, but can’t tell you why.[10]

Specifically, Prof. Pullum said that Strunk and White misunderstood what constitutes the passive voice, and criticized their proscribing established usages such as the split infinitive and the use of which in a restrictive relative clause.[10] He also criticizes The Elements of Style in Language Log, a linguists' blog about language in popular media, for promoting linguistic prescriptivism and hypercorrection among Anglophones,[11] referring to it as "the book that ate America's brain".[12]

In the Boston Globe newspaper book review of The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005) edition describes the writing manual as an "aging zombie of a book . . . a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice."[13]

Editions in print

  • 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 0-978-0-205-63264-0 (contains the 4th edition text)

See also

References

  1. ^ The Elements of Style Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (2009), p. xiii, ISBN 0-978-0-205-63264-0
  2. ^ The Elements of Style Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (2009), p. x, ISBN 0-978-0-205-63264-0
  3. ^ The Elements of Style, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (2009) p.23, ISBN 0-978-0-205-63264-0
  4. ^ Strunk, Jr., William; E.B. White (1972) [1918]. The Elements of Style (2nd ed.). Plain Label Books. pp. 55–56. ISBN 9781603030502. http://books.google.com/?id=Hd5o74IehyoC&pg=PA55. Retrieved 2009-07-23. 
  5. ^ Strunk, Jr., William; E.B. White (1999) [1918]. The Elements of Style (4th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. p. 60. ISBN 9780205313426. OCLC 41548201. http://www.pearsonhighered.com/academic/product?ISBN=020530902X. Retrieved 2009-07-23. 
  6. ^ Strunk (1999), p. 60.
  7. ^ See the "they" entry in Chapter IV of the 1918 edition, and also gender-specific pronouns.
  8. ^ The Elements of Style, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (2009) p.xiii, ISBN 0-978-0-205-63264-0
  9. ^ William Strunk (1918). "III. Elementary Principles of Composition". The Elements of Style. 
  10. ^ a b Pullum, Geoffrey K (17 April 2009). "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice". The Chronicle of Higher Education 55 (32): B15. http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i32/32b01501.htm. Retrieved 2009-04-12. 
  11. ^ See "Sotomayor loves Strunk and White" (Geoffrey Pullum, 12 June 2009), "Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid" (Geoffrey Pullum, 6 June 2009), "Room for debate on Strunk and White" (Geoffrey Pullum, 25 April 2009), and other postings on the subject, tagged as prescriptivist poppycock (retrieved on 13 June 2009).
  12. ^ Pullum, Geoffrey K (12 June 2009). "Sotomayer loves Strunk and White". Language Log. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1505. Retrieved 13 June 2009. 
  13. ^ Freeman, Jan (23 October 2005). "Frankenstrunk". The Boston Globe. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/10/23/frankenstrunk/. Retrieved 2009-04-12. 

External links

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