The Elements of Style
First expanded edition (1959)
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| Author |
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|---|---|
| Illustrator | Maira Kalman (2005 only) |
| Country | United States |
| Subject | American English style guide |
| Publisher |
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| Media type | Paperback book |
| Pages | 43 (1918), 52 (1920), 71 (1959), 105 (1999) |
| OCLC | 45802070 |
| 808/.042 21 | |
| LC Class | PE1421 .S7 (Strunk) PE1408 .S772 (Strunk & White) |
The Elements of Style is a prescriptive American English writing style guide in numerous editions. The original was composed by William Strunk Jr., in 1918, and published by Harcourt, in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage", ten "elementary principles of composition", "a few matters of form", a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused", and a list of 57 "words often misspelled". E. B. White greatly enlarged and revised the book for publication by Macmillan in 1959. That was the first edition of the so-called "Strunk & White", which Time named in 2011 as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.
Cornell University English professor William Strunk, Jr. wrote The Elements of Style in 1918 and privately published it in 1919, for in-house use at the university. (Harcourt republished it in 52-page format in 1920.) Later, for publication, he and editor Edward A. Tenney revised it as The Elements and Practice of Composition (1935). In 1957, at The New Yorker, the style guide reached the attention of E.B. White, who 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". Weeks later, White wrote a feature story about Strunk's devotion to lucid English prose.
Macmillan and Company subsequently commissioned White to revise The Elements for a 1959 edition (Strunk had died in 1946). 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 approximately two million copies in 1959. In the ensuing four decades, more than ten million copies of three editions have been sold. Mark Garvey relates the history of this writing manual in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style (2009).
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