Elementary, my dear Strunk & White
By Dave
April 28th, 2009 | Leave a comment
Aspiring writers receive lots of advice, often conflicting advice.
“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers,” Dorothy Parker once wrote, “the second-greatest favor 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.”
Strunk & White have long found themselves on the bookshelves of many writers, nestled next to the dictionary, thesaurus, AP Stylebook and a few other select titles (We would include William Zinsser’s On Writing Well and James Kilpatrick’s The Writer’s Art). Last week, it turned 50, or 90-something, depending on your perspective.
Happy birthday, The Elements of Style.
The Elements of Style rose to prominence in 1959 when E.B. White revised William Strunk’s original text four decades after Strunk first self-published the book while an English professor at Cornell (White was his student in 1919). It got some free press from White in The New Yorker and a boffo review in the
New York Times.
Elements has been revised several times since then, although it still can seem a tad quaint at times. And not all writers or “experts” appreciate Strunk & White’s “little book” of rules for writers. Then again, rules were made to be broken, no?
