In 1957, White, who wrote the children’s classics Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, rediscovered a brief guide to style by Strunk, his professor at Cornell University. White wrote an essay about it in the July 1957 issue of The New Yorker, introducing what would eventually become a bible for countless writers:
“The Elements of Style” was Will Strunk’s parvum opus, his attempt to cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin. Will himself hung the title “little” on the book: he referred to it sardonically and with secret pride as “the little book,” always giving the word “little” a special twist, as though he were putting a spin on a ball.
My high school English teacher used this venerable book to correct our grammar.
As well as pointing out specific violations (which he noted in red) of the “Elements”, he had a BIG RUBBER STAMP (using Green INK) which he would stamp on the top of many of our papers. It simply said:
OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS
So, I guess, in honor of Messrs. Strunk, White and Dougherty (my HS English Teacher-who was floored when I showed him an “A” paper from University) I will stop this comment without further words.
It has been a fixture on my desk for 42 years. I will never be without one.
Strunk and White
William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well”
and, (since I practice law for a living) Steven Stark’s “Writing to Win.”
But Strunk and White is the foundation.
I remember hearing a round-table on the radio some years back and at one point a chap corrected some arcane bit of grammar. Another participant said “Pay him no mind, he’s just the Strunk and White guy around here.”
Except being unfamiliar with the work, I heard it as “this drunken white guy” …
There’s a less sympathetic (and surely more accurate) description of this commemoration here:
50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice
I guess my link wasn’t formatted right. I’ll try again:
[url=”http://chronicle.com:80/free/v55/i32/32b01501.htm”]50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice[/url]
So, Sam, clearly, this is the kind of pedantic nonsense (in S&W;) up with which you will not put — and neither should we.
An interesting piece Sam. Thanks for the link.
Rich, I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t know Strunk and White well enough to call it nonsense; nor do I think the npr article was nonsense. (But the Pullum column in the Chronicle did struck a chord with me.)
Sam [9], yes, it was in reference to the examples in Pullum’s review, which you characterized as “more accurate” that I alluded to an apocryphal attribution to Churchill (e.g., here <http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html>.) All in fun.
pax tecum.
The new Strunk and White (and just as entertaining) is:
Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (Penguin, 2003).
The dedication reads:
“To the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution.”
Ah ok, thanks for that, Rich.
I’ve heard of the Truss book, and it sounds fascinating (I’ve always loved punctuation). But with limits. I can’t say that I really want to spend a lot of time reading about punctuation. I’ve always thought that the only real way to develop good writing habits is to read a lot — and not primarily books about writing, but books that are good.
in formatting links etc, do not use arrow brackets < or > but rather square brackets [ and ]. I hope this helps.
Lynne Truss wrote [i]Eats, Shoots and Leaves[/i] for the British market, and the publishers left it unchanged for the U.S. release—despite the fact that British and U.S. grammar and style traditions have undergone at least two centuries’ worth of significant departures from each other.
As “head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh,” Geoffrey K. Pullum seems unaware of those differences in his Scottish diatribe against a U.S.-targeted style guide.