ELEMENTS OF STYLE MANUAL

Five years later, the fourth edition text was re-published as The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005), with illustrations by the designer Maira Kalman.

White, an afterword by the American cultural commentator Charles Osgood, a glossary, and an index. Ĭomponents new to the fourth edition include a foreword by Roger Angell, stepson of E. He or She', in Chapter IV: Misused Words and Expressions, advises the writer to avoid an 'unintentional emphasis on the masculine'. In its place, the following sentence has been added: 'many writers find the use of the generic he or his to rename indefinite antecedents limiting or offensive.' Further, the re-titled entry 'They. The fourth edition of The Elements of Style (2000), published 54 years after Strunk's death, omits his stylistic advice about masculine pronouns: 'unless the antecedent is or must be feminine'. no longer has a comma in his name in the 1979 and later editions, due to the modernized style recommendation about punctuating such names. 'Elementary Principles of Composition', The Elements of Style 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 he make every word tell. 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. To write well, White advises writers to have the proper mind-set, that they write to please themselves, and that they aim for 'one moment of felicity', a phrase by Robert Louis Stevenson. The final reminder, the 21st, 'Prefer the standard to the offbeat', is thematically integral to the subject of The Elements of Style, yet does stand as a discrete essay about writing lucid prose. The third edition of The Elements of Style (1979) features 54 points: a list of common word-usage errors 11 rules of punctuation and grammar 11 principles of writing 11 matters of form and, in Chapter V, 21 reminders for better style. He also produced the second (1972) and third (1979) editions of The Elements of Style, by which time the book's length had extended to 85 pages. The 1959 edition features White's expansions of preliminary sections, the 'Introduction' essay (derived from his magazine story about Strunk), and the concluding chapter, 'An Approach to Style', a broader, prescriptive guide to writing in English. Strunk concentrated on the cultivation of good writing and composition the original 1918 edition exhorted writers to 'omit needless words', use the active voice, and employ parallelism appropriately. Īudiobook versions of The Elements now feature changed wording, citing 'gender issues' with the original. It was performed at the New York Public Library in October 2005. 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. Mark Garvey relates the history of the book in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style (2009).

More than ten million copies of three editions were later sold.

ELEMENTS OF STYLE MANUAL

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. Macmillan and Company subsequently commissioned White to revise The Elements for a 1959 edition (Strunk had died in 1946). Weeks later, White wrote about Strunk's devotion to lucid English prose in his column. 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'. In 1957 the style guide reached the attention of E.B. Tenney later revised it for publication as The Elements and Practice of Composition (1935). (Harcourt republished it in 52-page format in 1920.) He and editor Edward A.

wrote The Elements of Style in 1918 and privately published it in 1919, for use at the university. Cornell University English professor William Strunk Jr.

Elements of style