Monday, July 4, 2016

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 23 / The Elements of Style by William Strunk and EB White (1959)

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 23 – The Elements of Style by William Strunk and EB White (1959)

Dorothy Parker and Stephen King have both urged aspiring writers towards this crisp guide to the English language where brevity is key

Robert McCrum
Monday 4 July 2016

Dorothy Parker once wrote: “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favour 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.”

Many Americans, who believe that writing can be taught, will turn to The Elements of Style as the indispensable road map through a trackless desert of whirling words. From the Great War to the cold war, this little book of scarcely 90 pages, was just one college professor’s attempt to cut “the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin”.

Those are the words of EB White, who, having been taught English at Cornell University by Prof William Strunk Jr, was commissioned in 1957 by the publishers Macmillan to revise Strunk’s privately printed course book on style for the general reader as well as the college market. In Britain, whose relationship to the English language has been more mandarin, the equivalent title is HW Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926).

EB White

In its original, privately printed guise, The Elements of Style was a 43-page summary of, in White’s words, “the case for cleanliness, accuracy and brevity in the use of English”. After half a century, he conceded, it was still “a barely tarnished gem”, so little broken that it barely required fixing. “Seven rules of usage, 11 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.”

White added his own chapter “on writing” – about English prose composition, and that was that. “Strunk & White”, a title routinely chosen as one of the most influential books ever written in English, was ready to take its place in the front line of the ongoing battle to save the language from corruption, marching to war against the horrors of jargon, prolixity and grammatical solecism beneath a banner inscribed with one simple slogan: “Omit needless words”.

In the New Yorker of 1957, addressing the task he had undertaken, EB White recalled that when, in college, “I was sitting in [Strunk’s] class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having short-changed himself – a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times.”

As Lewis Carroll once observed, “What I tell you three times is true.” The Elements of Style is replete with many timeless truths about modern English usage, truths that have trickled down into the literary consciousness of many generations of journalists and writers. Some of Strunk’s wisdom is still chiefly revered in the US, but his explication of the nature and beauty of brevity is almost poetic: “vigorous writing is concise. 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. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

Everyone immersed in the joys of the English language – school teachers, journalists, poets, diarists and doodlers – knows that many rules of style are a matter of personal choice (Strunk happened to loathe “forceful” and “the fact that”) and even that some established rules of grammar are open to challenge. Shakespeare, it’s often pointed out, broke almost every rule in the book.

“The best writers,” admitted Strunk, “sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric.” At the same time, his guidelines, based on generations of accumulated custom and practice, will help the ordinary beginner to find clarity, brevity and candour in self-expression. It won’t teach you to write, but it will make what you do write a lot more readable, vigorous, and persuasive.

EB White published two revisions of his 1959 edition (in 1972 and 1979). By then, the world in which Strunk had first addressed split infinitives; the importance of the comma “before a conjunction introducing a dependent clause”; and the difference between “anticipate” and “expect”, had been almost completely swept away by the cultural avalanche of mass communications, multiculturalism, and the so-called “permissive society”.

In a time of acute change, The Elements of Style could seem fuddy-duddy and redundant. In 2005, the Boston Globe, breaking ranks with the New York Times and the Washington Post, many of whose journalists continue to revere Strunk and White, declared it to have become an “ageing zombie of a book ... a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice”.

And yet, despite the passage of time, changes in fashion, and the ravages of the IT revolution, there were some, like the writer Stephen King, who refused to back down in the face of change. In his excellent style manual, On Writing (2000), King observed, “There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. (Of course, it’s short; at 85 pages it’s much shorter than this one.) I’ll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style.”

In Britain, where Strunk & White is still not widely known, but where a misplaced apostrophe can still look like the end of civilisation as we know it, the journalist Lynne Truss published a long and passionate footnote to The Elements of Style in 2003, with her bestselling “zero tolerance approach to punctuation”, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. By now matters of taste and grammar had become hand-to-hand fighting against trolls and Visigoths on the barricades of the contemporary culture war.

Truss’s guide was highly entertaining, but a long way from the sobriety and poise of Prof Strunk and his gifted disciple, the author of another American classic, Charlotte’s Web. Let White, writing in 1979, have the last word: “... standing, in a drafty time, erect, resolute, and assured, I still find the Strunkian wisdom a comfort, the Strunkian humour a delight, and the Strunkian attitude towards right and wrong a blessing undisguised”.

A Signature Sentence

“Thus, a brief description, a brief book review, a brief account of a single incident, a narrative merely outlining an action, the setting forth of a single idea – any one of these is best written in a single paragraph.”