A short life of the author
William Strunk Jr. wrote the most influential book about writing in the English language — a book so brief, so dogmatic, and so effective that it has shaped the prose style of virtually every educated American for over a century. The Elements of Style — originally a forty-three-page pamphlet that Strunk privately printed and distributed to his students at Cornell University in 1918 — was rescued from obscurity by his former student E. B. White, who revised and expanded it for Macmillan in 1959. The resulting “little book” (as both Strunk and White called it) has sold over ten million copies, has been required reading in writing courses at thousands of universities, and has established the principles of clarity, brevity, and directness that define the dominant American prose ideal.
The Professor
William Strunk Jr. was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1869 and spent his career at Cornell University, where he was a professor of English from 1891 until his retirement in 1937. He was a Shakespeare scholar by training — he edited King Lear and other plays for the Lake English Classics series — but his scholarly publications were modest, and his enduring fame rests entirely on the little pamphlet he composed for his English 8 course.
Strunk was, by all accounts, a small, precise, energetic man who brought a fierce conviction about correctness and clarity to his teaching. White, remembering him decades later, described him as “a positive man” who “omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed to be in a state of controlled rapture.”
The Elements of Style
The original Elements of Style (1918) was divided into sections on usage, composition, form, and commonly misused words and expressions. Its rules were absolute, its examples were devastating, and its tone was the tone of a man who had no patience for uncertainty.
“Omit needless words.” “Use the active voice.” “Put statements in positive form.” “Use definite, specific, concrete language.” These injunctions — each illustrated with examples that made the wrong choice look absurd and the right choice look inevitable — constituted a philosophy of prose as much as a set of rules. Strunk believed that good writing was clear writing, that clarity was achieved through economy, and that economy required the relentless elimination of everything that did not contribute directly to meaning.
The White Revision
In 1957, a former student named E. B. White — by then one of the most celebrated essayists in America, the author of Charlotte’s Web, and a staff writer at The New Yorker — was commissioned by Macmillan to revise and expand Strunk’s pamphlet. White added a chapter on style (“An Approach to Style”), wrote an introduction describing Strunk and his methods, and made modest revisions to the original text. The resulting book — slim, elegant, opinionated — was published in 1959 as The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.
The book was an immediate success and has never been out of print. It has been revised several times (the fourth edition, 2000, is the current version) and has sold over ten million copies. “Strunk and White” became a synecdoche for the entire enterprise of learning to write clear English prose.
Criticism and Influence
The Elements of Style has not been without critics. Linguists have pointed out that many of Strunk’s rules are based on personal preference rather than grammatical principle, that the book’s hostility to the passive voice is arbitrary, and that its ideal of brevity can lead to a prose that is efficient but colourless. Geoffrey Pullum’s essay “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice” (2009) was the most sustained attack, arguing that Strunk and White’s grammatical advice was often wrong and their stylistic advice was often followed by neither author.
These criticisms are valid in their particulars but miss the book’s larger significance. The Elements of Style succeeded not because its rules were always correct but because it articulated, with memorable force, an ideal of prose that was democratic, transparent, and respectful of the reader’s time — an ideal that has served as the default standard for American nonfiction writing for over a century. The book also embodies a paradox: Strunk’s ideal of transparency — “place yourself in the background” — was itself a style, and a highly distinctive one. The writers who followed Strunk’s rules most faithfully (Hemingway, E. B. White, Joan Didion in her reported prose) were anything but invisible; their clarity was a form of self-assertion. The real lesson of The Elements of Style may be not its explicit rules but the implicit demonstration that caring deeply about sentences — about the difference between the right word and the nearly right word — is a form of respect for both the subject and the reader.
Collecting Strunk
The original Elements of Style (privately printed, Ithaca, NY, 1918) is extremely scarce — a pamphlet produced for classroom use in small quantities. The Strunk-White first edition (Macmillan, 1959) is the standard collecting edition and is sought in dust jacket. Later editions (1972, 1979, 2000) are common. The illustrated edition (Penguin, 2005, illustrated by Maira Kalman) is a separate collecting area.