Clear, Brief and
Bold:
Will Strunk’s Legacy
The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White.
It is the duty of anyone attempting to write English to know this book. You may know it as “Strunk and White”—one of its pet names. How many style guides have pet names? Its full title is The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr., with Revisions, an Introduction, and a Chapter on Writing by E. B. White. It is the only style guide referred to by famous writers with words like “beloved,” “treasured,” and “a blessing undisguised.”
This little book is a masterpiece of concision. At 92 pages (including index), it takes up scarcely more room in a jacket pocket than a chequebook. And if you know the book, you know why it is small. Rule Seventeen: Omit needless words. Because of its quiet, compact perfection, it is considered a work of art by those who pronounce on such matters. Its message is “be clear, be brief, be bold”, and that is how it is written. If there were a Bauhaus of usage, this would be its syllabus.
Who was this Mies van der Rohe of English style guides? Who was this Strunk whose very name evokes the sound of a book slammed down on the desk for emphasis: STRUNK! Omit needless words!
William Strunk (1869–1949) was a Cornell English professor, and The Elements of Style started life as his course textbook. According to his former pupil E. B. White (who became the book’s editor and reviser), Strunk attempted in writing The Elements of Style to “cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin.”
Concision was Strunk’s touchstone. “A sentence,” he wrote, “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.”
What exactly is that “same reason”? He doesn’t actually say; probably thought it didn’t need explaining. But editor White writes in the introduction:
All through The Elements of Style one finds evidences of the author’s deep sympathy for the reader. Will felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, a man floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get this man up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope.
This was decades before anyone thought up the term “user-friendly.” In fact, the notion that good writing should help the reader was not such a commonplace early in this century. “Good” writing was thought to consist in a “learned,” filigreed style that distinguished a lady or gentleman from the common herd. To Strunk and his apostle White we owe a debt of gratitude for helping to strip away the ostentation from serious discourse and raising the status of plain speaking and plain writing in modern English.
Strunk had his course textbook privately printed at his own expense in 1918. In 1957, a publisher commissioned E. B. White to revise and edit Strunk’s little book for a general audience. White (1899–1985), was an essayist, poet, humorist, and author who had fond memories of Professor Strunk’s classroom. Toward the end of his life, White summed up his writing career by saying, “Well, perhaps I did omit a few needless words.“
The book is divided into five major sections: “Elementary Rules of Usage”, “Elementary Principles of Composition”, “A Few Matters of Form”, “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused” and “An Approach to Style.” The latter is entirely White’s contribution.
There are exactly eleven “Elementary Rules of Usage” and eleven “Elementary Principles of Composition,” and the Table of Contents does us the favor of stating each of them in full, along with White’s twenty-one “Reminders.”
That means you don’t even have to read past page ix to get the message: Strive for the clear, the brief, the bold.