By Jesse Vanderveeken
“This is the Bible of writing…,” the TA declared in his matter-of-fact manner, a ruthless passion propelling him through the final tutorial of the semester.
“... Strunk and White’s infamous Elements of Style,” he finished, a thin grey paperback floating on display for all six students present.
His words hung in the still air, as if they were the rites to some coming-of-age ritual—an incantation summoning some ancient wisdom that crawled through the years to be born…
This was my first exposure to “the little book”—a colloquial name for William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s Elements of Style (and, I might add, a testament to its long life in the popular imagination).
At the time, I became possessed by a hopeless ambition to consume this book—to rote-memorize every word and recite them like a prayer before bed. I imagined myself as Will Smith’s character in The Pursuit of Happiness, reading softly from his own “bible” in the cramped communal bedrooms of a men’s hostel, however, I was forced to part from Strunk and White prematurely as I was thrown head-first into my freshmen exams.
Since then, I have become skeptical of the stern prescriptivism often associated with “Sergeant Strunk’s” Elements of Style (an association not entirely fair as we will see). As a linguistics student, I am told at the onset of every course that linguists do not prescribe rules on how to speak correctly, but rather describe how people speak in actuality. For example, a linguist does not hear a passerby say “I seen it,” and suddenly cringe from secondhand embarrassment, thinking, “What a dunce. Do they not know how to correctly construct the present perfective tense?” No. A linguist would think, “Wow, I wonder why this speaker made the decision he did” (and depending on their specialization, they will have various viable theories). The result, therefore, is that linguistics—like most other sciences—is considered descriptivist rather than prescriptivist.
I have reason to believe that this descriptivist mindset has seeped out of linguistics and into our broader society. With this in mind, I thought to return to Strunk’s age-old “prescriptivist” work with a critical eye for what it can still offer the contemporary reader.
But First, Some Background
The Elements of Style, was first written and privately published by William Strunk Jr. circa 1919 as a textbook for one of his courses at Cornell University. This version was later reexamined by one of Strunk’s former students, E.B. White, and published for the consumer market in 1957. White updated and revised the original, in addition to writing a new chapter titled “Approaches to Style.” This section toned down some of the prescriptivism we just touched upon, partially to account for the “fuzziness” of creative writing—White’s bread and butter.
In this post, I will review the 4th edition of the Elements, published in 1999. This edition is arranged into 5 sections:
Elementary Rules of Usage (which tackles basic English grammar)
Elementary Principles of Composition (which considers the composing of clear and concise sentences/paragraphs)
A Few Matters of Form (which looks at formatting papers in an academic setting)
Words and Expressions Commonly Misused
An Approach to Style (which ponders the general principles of impactful writing, both academic and creative)
Taken as a whole, the book is a long list of rules (22 of Strunk’s, 21 of White’s)—with a couple of glossaries defining words and their correct usage. These rules are formalized as imperatives, as in: “Put statements in positive form,” and “Do not explain too much” (Strunk and White 19, 75). However, in spite of this authoritarian rhetoric, the reader wonders—spurred by convincing exposition and clear exceptions to the rule—whether these “rules for writing” are meaningfully prescriptive and at all hindering for budding contemporary writers.
Too Prescriptive?
All of the chapters listed previously, except for “V”, were written by Strunk (and, presumably, altered slightly by White). While the popular caricature of Strunk is a stern drill sergeant who would go berserk after seeing one comma out of line, most of his rules for writing are surprisingly tame:
Number 3: Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas. (2)
…
Number 10: Use the proper case of a pronoun. (11)
…
Number 17: Omit needless words. (23)
Strunk even prefaces many rules by admitting they do not hold in every case. However, before deviating from these rules, Strunk recommends mastering them through practice and cultivating what White later calls a “good ear”. As the saying goes, you must know the rules to break them.
For example, in his explanation for “Rule #6: Do not break sentences in two,” Strunk presents the exception of when a writer is trying to emphasize a word or expression.
For example, “Again and again he called out. No reply.”
Strunk prefaces this exception by saying the “writer must, however, be certain that the emphasis is warranted,” and for other exceptions, he supplies similar warnings (7).
It would seem then that, for Strunk, the goal of learning is to develop good intuition rather than simply memorizing lists of rules. Most of his prescriptive imperatives are then only “gentle reminders [... which] state what most of us know and at times forget” (66).
As White notes appropriately in the book’s introduction, “even the established rules of grammar are open to challenge. Professor Strunk, although one of the most inflexible and choosy of men, was quick to acknowledge the fallacy of inflexibility and the danger of doctrine” (xvii). This much is clear from a closer examination of Strunk’s work, where this fallacy is carefully avoided by instructing the growing writer on how to “remove their training wheels” once they have gained their balance. Perhaps then, “Sergeant Strunk” is more a playful alliteration than an accurate characterization of the Cornell professor.
A Guide to Living Well?
Strunk’s general assertions throughout The Elements, with their emphasis on what one should or ought to do, lend themselves to a moral interpretation. As a result, his rules become dictums for living well in addition to writing well:
If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! [(a phrase White recalls Strunk saying while teaching)]. (xviii)
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 [Strunk, the pragmatist?]. (23)
Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colourless, hesitating, noncommittal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, never as a means of evasion. (19)
Note [...] that when a sentence is made stronger, it actually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor. (19)
The above are more than lessons for writing. Strunk seemingly urges the reader to not only commit to their statements, but to commit to actions in general—to live boldly and avoid what seems unnecessary.
This double-meaning continues into White’s section of the book as, to him, being a good writer and being a good person are seemingly interchangeable. For White, “No writer long remains incognito” as their writing “reveal[s] something of their spirits, their habits, their capacities, and their biases” (67). In a sense, both literary and moral sins are made bare on the page, and the reader is judge and executioner.
With some writers, style not only reveals the spirit of the man but his identity, as surely as would his fingerprints [...] The beginner should approach style warily, realising that it is an expression of self, and should turn resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style—all mannerisms, tricks, adornments. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity. (69)
The notion that writing is an act of expressing self, or, as Suzanne Briet would have put it, “rendering [ourselves] and [our] objects of interest in documentary form,” is outlined beautifully throughout the Elements (qtd. in Reader 5). The reader is inspired to improve their writing, not to blend into a formulaic standard, but to express more of themselves in their words.
The possibility of such an interpretation is a testament to the flexibility of this book. Others have recounted using it to improve writing skills in genres as diverse as theatrical drama and stand-up comedy. The book’s rules are simple and general enough to be flexible and easy to remember while being so full of examples and sub-rules as to be useful for reference in an academic setting (after all, Strunk initially wrote it for such a setting).
Final Thoughts: A Useful Text in our Modern Age?
From what I have gathered from podcast discussions and online reviews, The Elements of Style is seen as somewhat outdated, if not completely incompatible with our modern world. As Roger Angell notes in the foreword, “What is not here is anything about E-mail—the rules-free, lower-case flow that cheerfully keeps us in touch these days” (x-xi). The podcast hosts of the Book Pile and Overdue (during their review of the book), both make similar jokes on this note saying that “if Strunk saw [... insert internet thing here] then he would have a heart attack” (Getting and Cunningham; Erskine and Vance).
Although I am sure that a professor of the early 20th century would be greatly troubled by the internet, I am not sure that his book being outdated follows from this. With Strunk’s words on writing illuminated and expanded on by White (a most appropriate successor)—and couched in the considerate commentary of Roger Angell and Charles Osgood—this work compiles many perspectives on writing in a sequential and multigenerational way. Additionally, the reader is not only given the chance to peel back these layers of time, but to build their own style on the contingencies of the present. Here and now, they are given a small list of tried and true rules to guide their quest for literary enlightenment. And with interminable amounts of patience, devotion, reading, writing, rewriting, revising and editing, alongside their companions Strunk and White, those hopeful souls might just make it.
References:
Erskine, Kellen and David Vance. “The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White.” The Book Pile, Spotify, 12 April 2021.
Getting, Craig and Andrew Cunningham. “The Elements of Style by Strunk and White”. Overdue, episode 15, Spotify, 20 may 2013.
Reader, Simon. Notework : Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style. Stanford University Press, 2021.
Strunk, William, and E. B. (Elwyn Brooks) White. The Elements of Style. 4th ed., Pearson, 2000.
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