The authors are William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White; thus the book is often referred to as Strunk and White. It has a curious history, of the sort that fascinates me. I must have known it at one point, but when I read its Introduction recently saw that I had all but forgotten it.
As E.B. White explains, Strunk had written the original Elements of Style by 1918, when it served as the text for the English 8 class Strunk taught, and White took, at Cornell. Its purpose, White said, was “to cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin.”
“Even after I got through tampering with it,” White said, “it was still a tiny thing, a barely tarnished gem. Seven rules of usage, eleven 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.”
“Vigorous writing is concise,” Strunk declares on p. 23, under the heading Omit Needless Words. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, he argues, “for the same reason a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
The chapter called “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused” is probably my favorite. The subject is dear to me. Though written over a century ago it, and the book, remain valid and valuable.
Find The Elements of Style, read its fewer than 100 pages, and keep it nearby at all times.
Addendum: E.B. White wrote Charlotte’s Web and a lot of other stuff. According to Ralph Keyes in The Courage to Write (also recommended), he “worried over every word ... and sometimes pleaded with the postmaster ... to return a just-mailed manuscript so he could punch up its ending or re-write the lead.”
