Founding Grammars (33 page)

Like Murray, Strunk slanted his material toward his targeted readers. His purpose was not to give comprehensive or sophisticated style advice. As he makes clear in the book's introduction, his aim was more limited. He describes the book as “intended for use in English courses in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature.” He warns his students, “The book covers only a small portion of the field of English style.” He recommends several more substantial guides that they should also consult.

Strunk doesn't expect his classes to learn how to write well by studying a forty-three-page booklet. “Once past the essentials,” he explains, “students profit most by individual instruction based on the problems of their own work.” Furthermore, he does not advocate blind adherence even to these basic rules. “The best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric,” he admits. He then adds with characteristic bluntness, “When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit.… Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules.” He advises students to learn how to write “plain English adequate for everyday uses” before they attempt to develop an original style.
37

Strunk organized the book for maximum ease of use. Besides the brief introductory comments, it consists of four sections, each with a numbered list of rules and accompanying comments. The table of contents lists every rule, so users can quickly find help for a particular problem. The first section after the introduction lists eight “Elementary Rules of Usage.” Most of these deal with punctuation—“Form the possessive singular of nouns with
's
”; “Do not join independent clauses by a comma.” The rules are succinct and unadorned. As White put it, “for sheer pith … it probably sets a record that is not likely to be broken.”
38

Strunk realized that applying his pithy rules could be tricky, so he fleshed them out with explanatory remarks and examples. For instance, after stating the rule “Form the possessive singular of nouns with
's
” he gives a list of exceptions—
Moses' laws, for righteousness' sake.
Often, rules that sound too sweeping on their own are put in context in the explanatory paragraph. Expanding on the rule “Use the active voice,” Strunk says. “This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.”
39

A section on composition follows the usage section. This part of the book offers guidelines for structuring a piece of writing. Here, too, the advice is basic and straightforward—“As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic sentence.” Several of the rules—there are eighteen in all—are reminiscent of Murray's “Perspicuity” section, where he proposed guidelines for good writing. Murray's three requirements for strong writing were “purity, propriety, precision.” Strunk's principles are similar. “Put statements in positive form,” he enjoins his students, don't use slangy terms like
lose out
and
kind of,
and of course, “omit needless words.” Murray advised his readers to avoid ending sentences with “any inconsiderable word.” Strunk tells students to “place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.” Although Strunk doesn't say so, it's safe to assume that he would have felt as reluctant as Murray to end a sentence with a preposition.
40

The book continues with a section on form—mainly covering the accepted format for quotations and references—and ends with checklists of misused and misspelled words. Strunk describes the items on the misused list as “not so much bad English” as “careless writing.” Some are standard entries in “frequently confused” lists—
affect
/
effect, fewer
/
less
—or standard usage critics' peeves, such as using
due to
to mean
because of
instead of
attributable to.
Others seem to be more personal dislikes. Strunk labels
factor
“a hackneyed word” and calls
student body
a “needless and awkward” phrase better expressed by the simple
students.

Although Strunk mentions one or two usage issues—he tells students not to use
they
with
everybody,
for example—
The Elements of Style
is almost devoid of actual grammar advice. Rather, it reflects Strunk's preoccupations as a teacher. It addresses basic composition errors, such as poor organization, wordiness, and confusion about how to use quotations. Strunk would no doubt have been surprised if anyone had told him that his little book of writing hints would one day metamorphose into the new sticklers' Bible.

*   *   *

Strunk retired from teaching in 1937 and
The Elements of Style
disappeared from the Cornell bookstore's shelves. It might have disappeared entirely if not for White. White's college years were mostly taken up with editing the well-regarded
Cornell Daily Sun.
As he later admitted, he was only loosely engaged with his classwork. His English 8 class, however, was an exception. Long after leaving Cornell, he would write to Strunk's brother recalling the class as one of a handful of educational experiences that had stayed with him. “The ideal of precision, of brevity, of clarity,” he wrote, “it can hardly be called an education but it has been such a help.”
41

Even so, White's memory of Strunk's book was hazy when he encountered it again. By the time it arrived in his mailbox in March 1957, White had been a
New Yorker
staff writer for three decades and was famous as the author of
Stuart Little
and
Charlotte's Web.
The book was a gift from former classmate Howard Stevenson. Stevenson, now the editor of the
Cornell Alumni News,
had discovered two copies of
Elements
in Cornell's library and somehow beguiled the librarians into parting with one so he could send it to White. It's rare for libraries to surrender their books. Cornell's librarians might have agreed to it because White was a celebrated alumnus or because the self-published book didn't seem especially valuable.

Writing about the book in
The New Yorker,
White confesses that he had nearly forgotten about it, although he must once have owned a copy. He was delighted to rediscover its virtues. White admired the book's succinctness and heartily approved of its forceful tone. He describes it as “a forty-three page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.” It is, he says, Strunk's attempt to “cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin.”

He imagines “Sergeant Strunk” snapping orders to his platoon of student writers—“Do not join independent clauses with a comma”; “In summaries, keep to one tense.” Most of all, “Omit needless words.” White confides, “I have been trying to omit needless words since 1919 and although there are still many words that cry for omission, and the huge task will never be accomplished, it is exciting to me to reread the masterly Strunkian elaboration of this noble theme.”
42

Besides outlining the content of the book for
New Yorker
readers, White paints a charming picture of his former teacher, who had died eleven years earlier. He writes nostalgically, “From every line there peers out at me the puckish face of my professor, his short hair parted neatly in the middle and combed down over his forehead, his eyes blinking incessantly behind steel rimmed spectacles,… his smile shuttling to and fro.” White assumes that Cornell's English classes now rely on much longer, fancier textbooks than
The Elements of Style
—“books with upswept tail fins and automatic verbs.” Still, if faced with college students in need of writing advice, he says, “I would simply lean far out over the desk, clutch my lapels, blink my eyes, and say, ‘Get the
little
book! Get the
little
book! Get the
little
book!'”
43

White's brief essay sparked an immediate response. The same week that it appeared in
The New Yorker,
Jack Case, an editor at Macmillan Company, wrote to White expressing interest in an updated version of
The Elements of Style.
No one at the publishing house had yet seen the original, but Case and others there believed that an unadulterated shot of plain grammar advice was just what midcentury Americans craved. It would be an antidote to the unsettling linguistics-based theories of language use then making the rounds of college English departments.

White agreed to edit and enlarge the book, and his new edition appeared in the spring of 1959. Although much longer than the original, it still amounted to only seventy-one pages. Nearly all of Strunk's content remained unchanged. In White's words, he “added a bit, subtracted a bit, rearranged it in a few places, and in general … made small alterations.”
44
The section on misused words almost doubled. White added several common usage critics' peeves—
hopefully
used as a sentence modifier,
different than
used for
different from, unique
used with modifiers like
very.
White also deleted the section on misspelled words and replaced some of Strunk's literary examples with excerpts from modern authors such as Faulkner and Hemingway.

The biggest change from the 1918 book is an added final section, “An Approach to Style.” With this section, White released the book from its English 8 straitjacket and expanded it into an exploration of the writing process itself. Part inspirational essay and part practical checklist, it guides writers through the tangled thickets of composition. White explains that it's intended to provide “gentle reminders” of “what most of us know and, at times, forget.”

He cautions that there is “no infallible guide to good writing.” How to achieve style in its larger sense of the writer's distinctive voice is something of a mystery, and this final chapter is “a mystery story, thinly disguised.” However, to keep the tone of the book consistent, White has decided to present his reminders in the form of twenty-one numbered rules, each followed by a clarifying paragraph.
45

When formulating his rules, White adopts Strunk's tone of clipped command. Some rules are broad enough to encompass a whole writing philosophy—“Write in a way that comes naturally,” while others address a specific issue—“Use orthodox spelling”—but all are short and curtly stated. White ends his style section by repeating his old professor's central dictum. Beginning writers, he says, “should err on the side of conservatism.” Although he assures his readers that English is “a living stream,” where “no idiom is taboo, no accent forbidden,” he thinks it's best to be “armed with the rules of grammar” before venturing into new creative territory.
46

Although
Elements
is often described as a grammar book, White's revision, like Strunk's original, contained very little grammar advice. What does exist, however, is relentlessly conservative. For instance, although White admits that “there is a precedent from the fourteenth century downward for interposing an adverb between
to
and the infinitive,” he advises, “the construction is for the most part avoided by careful writers.” He also upholds Strunk's position that
he
(not
he or she
) should be paired with words like
everyone,
unless the referent “is or must be feminine.”
They
is never correct.
47

Some of White's comments in the text suggest a more flexible attitude. “Style rules of this sort are, of course, somewhat a matter of individual preference,” he acknowledges in his introduction, “and even the established rules of grammar are open to challenge.” He prefaces the list of suggested usage guides that begins the misused words section with a remark that almost seems to echo Whitney or Lounsbury. “The shape of our language is not rigid,” he says. “In questions of usage we have no lawgiver whose word is final.”
48

This theoretical openness didn't translate into a broad-mindedness about specifics. In practice, White was firmly in the purists' camp. Both he and his editor, Jack Case, were contemptuous of academic linguists, or as White called them, “the Happiness Boys,” who to their minds encouraged an “anything goes” attitude toward language use. Case nonetheless understood that the book would be vulnerable to criticism if outdated rules, such as the distinction between
shall
and
will,
were allowed to stand the way Strunk had written them. He suggested in a letter that White might soften his stance by inserting the words “in formal writing” or some similar formula here and there. White answered implacably, “I don't know whether Macmillan is running scared or not,… but I know that I cannot, and will-shall not, attempt to adjust the unadjustable Mr. Strunk to the modern liberal of the English Department.”
49

White and Strunk both understood that language and usage evolve—as a graduate student, Strunk had studied philology as well as literature—but they believed in the traditional rules. Later in his response to Case, White explains, “No ball game [is] anything but chaotic if it lacks a mound, a box, bases, and foul lines. That's what Strunk was about, that's what I am about, and that (I hope) is what the book is about.”
50
Strunk and White's foul lines were drawn very close to the ones that Lowth and Murray had laid down. They only swerved to incorporate a few later contributions from the verbal critics, such as the ban on split infinitives. If White's readers wanted to experiment with usage and grammar, they were free to do so. However, they would do it without permission from
Elements.
Strunk and White's principles would remain unapologetically conventional. As with earlier guidelines, they would harden over time into articles of faith.