When I was in college, we were required by my freshman composition professor to buy a little handbook called “The Elements of Style,” but everybody just called it “Strunk and White.”
According to the introduction in the book, it was intended “to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention … on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated.”
American grammarian William Strunk Jr. was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1869. He was an English teacher at Cornell University for 46 years and edited works of Shakespeare and James Fenimore Cooper. In 1918, he self-published a little book (only 45 pages long) to be used by his students, called “The Elements of Style.” He revised it in 1935; and in the late 1950s (just in time for me to be introduced to it in 1957), one of his former students, the writer and New Yorker editor E.B. White, revised and reissued the 1935 edition. That’s how it became known as “Strunk and White.”
I still have my copy somewhere, buried among the boxed detritus from my desk when I retired. The book is full of all kinds of helpful advice to aspiring writers and students. In it, you may find such wisdom as, “Instead of announcing that what you are about to say is interesting, make it so,” and “Never call a stomach a tummy without good reason.”
“The Elements of Style” is not a textbook; it is what we English teachers call a prescriptive writing style guide. It contains eight “elementary rules of usage” such as: Form the possessive singular of nouns with ’s; Place a comma before and or but introducing an independent clause, etc.
Editors beware: There’s one rule that I love (and which my editors often change!) that deals with the use of commas to separate items in a series. Here’s Strunk and White’s rule: “Use a comma to separate the elements in a series (three or more things), including the last two. ‘He hit the ball, dropped the bat, and ran to first base.’” (This last comma—the one between the word “and” and the preceding word—is often called the serial comma or the Oxford comma.)
Newspaper editors use a different style sheet that says the comma before the “and” is unnecessary. In newspaper writing, you will seldom find a serial (or Oxford) comma, but that is not necessarily a sign that it should be omitted in academic prose. There are situations in which, if you don’t use this comma (especially when the list is complex or lengthy), the last two items in the list will try to glom together (like macaroni and cheese). Using a comma between all the items in a series, including the last two, avoids this problem.
Strunk and White included a list of 10 “elementary principles of composition.” These included items such as: Make the paragraph the unit of composition — one paragraph to each topic; Use the active voice. The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive; Omit needless words; Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.
One section of the book had a list of 49 “words and expressions commonly misused” and another section was a list of 57 “words often misspelled.”
In 2011, Time magazine listed “The Elements of Style” as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923. American author Dorothy Parker once wrote: “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of ‘The Elements of Style.’ The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
My freshman comp professor also had us buy a copy of “Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition,” the 12th-grade edition, by John Warriner. Warriner had written a series of textbooks intended for sixth through 12th grades. I had used them when I was in high school, and when I started teaching, I used those texts with my students, starting in 1961 and continuing until I retired in 1998. That series was first published in 1946, and it’s still going strong. I read that Warriner’s was “one of the best selling series in textbook publishing history” and that 30 million copies had been sold.
Isn’t it interesting that, although the language is continually changing, the old reliable textbooks are still the ones that seem to dictate our usage?
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