The Elements of Style (Recorded Books Edition)

Down here in White's last chapter, write in a way that comes naturally. Revise and rewrite. Do not explain too much. Above all, the cleansing clarion, be clear. How often I have turned to them in the book or in my mind while trying to start or unblock or revise some piece of my own writing, they help, they really do, they work, they are the way. E. B. White's prose is celebrated for its ease and clarity. Just think of Charlotte's Web. But maintaining this standard required endless attention. When the new issue of the New Yorker turned up in Maine, I sometimes saw him reading his comment piece over to himself, with only a slightly different expression than the one he'd worn on the day it went off. Well, okay, he seemed to be saying. At least I got the elements right. This edition has been modestly updated, with word processors and air conditioners making their first appearance among White's references, and with a light redistribution of genders to permit a feminine pronoun or female farmer to take their places among the males who once innocently served him. Sylvia Plath has knocked Keats out of the box, and I noticed that America has become this country in a sample text to forestall a subsequent and possibly demeaning she in the same paragraph. What is not here is anything about email, the rules-free, lowercase flow that cheerfully keeps us in touch these days. Email is conversation, and it may be replacing the sweet and endless talking we once sustained and tucked away within the informal letter. But we are all writers and readers as well as communicators. With the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves, as White put it, with the clear and almost perfect thought. Introduction by E. B. White. At the close of the First World War, when I was a student at Cornell, I took a course called English 8. My professor was William Strunk, Jr. A textbook required for the course was a slim volume called The Elements of Style, whose author was the professor himself. The year was 1919. The book was known on the campus in those days as The Little Book, with the stress on the word little. It had been privately printed by the author. I passed the course, graduated from the university, and forgot the book, but not the professor. Some 38 years later, the book bobbed up again in my life when Macmillan commissioned me to revise it for the college market and the general trade. Meantime, Professor Strunk had died. The Elements of Style, when I re-examined it in 1957, seemed to me to contain rich deposits of gold. It was Will Strunk's parvum opus, his attempt to cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pen. Will himself had hung the tag little on the book. He referred to it sardonically and with secret pride as The Little Book, always giving the word little a special twist, as though he were putting a spin on a ball. In its original form, it was a 43-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English. Today, 52 years later, its vigor is unimpaired, and for sheer pith, I think it probably sets a record that is not likely to be broken. Even after I got through tampering with it, it was still a tiny thing, a barely tarnished gem. Seven rules of usage, eleven principles of composition, a few matters of form, and a list of words and expressions commonly misused. That was the sum and substance of Professor Strunk's work. Somewhat audaciously, and in an attempt to give my publisher his money's worth, I added a chapter called