No one seems to have explicitly noted that this is the centennial year of a little book that has (unaccountably) become extremely famous.* Professor William Strunk at Cornell University had it privately published in 1918 at a press owned by W.F. Humphrey in Geneva, N.Y., under the title The Elements of Style. Much of its text survives in the many subsequent revised versions, four of them since 1959 in an expanded and altered form to which E.B. White added his name. Right across America, students in undergraduate colleges and at graduate and professional schools are told to study this work and obey its edicts.
It is unforgivably lazy for instructors to continue directing 21st-century students to a text on the English language written by a man who learned it in the 19th century. (Strunk was born in 1869, when General Custer still had half a decade of successful military service ahead of him.) Language change in matters of grammar is not at all rapid, but even so, a century is long enough for noticeable evolution. We should not be teaching our students to write like people did during the First World War.
Despite its title, Strunk’s book hardly touched the topic of style. Few have noted this, but White acknowledges it in the first sentence of his added chapter (Chapter 5, “An Approach to Style,” in the 1959 revision and later editions): “Up to this point, the book has been concerned with what is correct, or acceptable, in the use of English.” Strunk covered basics like the genitive suffix (’s), where to put commas, separating topics through paragraph structure, and how to hyphenate at ends of lines (Strunk assumes you’re using a typewriter!). He offers various ill-explained general maxims about using positives not negatives, omitting needless words, avoiding loose sentences, expressing co-ordinate ideas in similar form, keeping related words together, not switching tenses, putting emphatic words at ends of sentences, and sticking to the active voice (Strunk was one of the very first writers on usage to express the now tediously ubiquitous disapproval of passives), and treats a very few minor technical matters of capitalization, citation, and quotation. The remaining chapter, “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused,” is just a potpourri of words Strunk disliked:
- Clever “has been greatly overused.”
- Dependable is a “needless substitute for reliable, trustworthy.”
- However is “not to come first in its sentence or clause” (see my discussion here).
- People “is not to be used with words of number, in place of persons.” (Strunk gives this ridiculously childish argument against the entirely standard use of people as a plural: “If of ‘six people’ five went away, how many ‘people’ would be left?”.)
- Respectively “may usually be omitted with advantage"; it may be needed “in geometrical proofs” but “should not appear in writing on ordinary subjects.”
- System is “frequently used without need.”
- They should never be used in contexts like anyone who thinks they might qualify; Strunk’s firm recommendation is to use anyone who thinks he might qualify.
These stipulations about alleged misuse are absurd. No competent writer could take them seriously.
College syllabi often point students to the Bartleby.com online reproduction of the original 1918 text (it is out of copyright), so they don’t have to go to the college bookstore for it. A reproduction of Strunk’s entire text (slightly revised at a couple of points) constitutes nearly 20 percent of N.M. Gwynne’s dreadful book Gwynne’s Grammar. But anyone who defends the peddling of Strunk’s century-old clunker on the grounds that the revision by E.B. White has modernized and improved it should think again. David Russinoff, who is much more favorably inclined toward Strunk than I am, argues cogently in his excellent essay “Strunk vs. White: An Analysis of Authorship” that White’s changes and additions made Strunk’s book significantly worse. My article “The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style (published in English Today; browsable version here) also criticizes White for ridiculous pothering, atavistic prejudices, and outright falsehoods.
We should not be sending students to a text as myopic and antiquated as The Elements of Style, not in any edition. To do so is pedagogically lazy, intellectually unconscionable, and budgetarily miserly (colleges should be employing intelligent writing tutors who have taken a course in the structure of English). Yet right across the curriculum, professors unthinkingly recommend obeisance to Strunk’s mediocre compilation of don’t-do-this maxims (which I suspect in many cases the professors barely remember and have never examined closely). A hundred years of this is enough. Especially since there are modern alternatives, like Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams and The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker.
*Note added much later: I was wrong about whether anyone had noted the centenary. No one in print, maybe. But the prescriptivism expert Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade had noticed (see her blog post here); and Jerry Morris, an avid collector of different editions of The Elements of Style, had (unsurprisingly) also noted it (see his blog post here). Sorry to have missed both these highly relevant posts.