The Elements of Style
The Elements of Style (also called Strunk & White) is a style guide to writing American English, published in numerous editions. The original was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage," ten "elementary principles of composition," "a few matters of form," a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused," and a list of 57 "words often misspelled." Writer and editor E. B. White greatly enlarged and revised the book for publication by Macmillan in 1959. That was the first edition of the book, which Time recognized in 2011 as one of the 100 best and most influential non-fiction books written in English since 1923.[2]
Author
- William Strunk Jr. (1918/1920)
- and E. B. White (1959)
Maira Kalman (2005 only)
American English style guide
- Harcourt, Brace & Howe (1920)
- Macmillan (1959)
- Allyn & Bacon (1999)
United States
Print (Paperback)
43 (1918), 52 (1920),[1] 71 (1959), 105 (1999)
808/.042 21
PE1421 .S7 (Strunk)[1]
PE1408 .S772 (Strunk & White)
American wit Dorothy Parker said, regarding the book:
History[edit]
Cornell University English professor William Strunk Jr. wrote The Elements of Style in 1918 and privately published it in 1919, for use at the university. Harcourt republished it in 52-page format in 1920.[1] Strunk and editor Edward A. Tenney later revised it for publication as The Elements and Practice of Composition (1935). In 1957, the style guide reached the attention of E.B. White at The New Yorker. White had studied writing under Strunk in 1919 but had since forgotten "the little book" that he described as a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English." Weeks later, White wrote about Strunk's devotion to lucid English prose in his column.[4][5]
Strunk died in 1946. Macmillan and Company subsequently commissioned White to revise The Elements for a 1959 edition. White's expansion and modernization of Strunk and Tenney's 1935 revised edition yielded the writing style manual informally known as "Strunk & White', the first edition of which sold about two million copies in 1959. More than ten million copies of three editions were later sold.[6] Mark Garvey relates the history of the book in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style (2009).[7]
Maira Kalman, who provided the illustrations for The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005, see below), asked Nico Muhly to compose a cantata based on the book. It was performed at the New York Public Library in October 2005.[8][9][10]
Audiobook versions of The Elements now feature changed wording, citing "gender issues" with the original.[11]
Several books were titled paying homage to Strunk's, for example:
