The Elements of Style
"Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end."
— William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style (1920)
Introduction
| The Elements of Style | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Author | William Strunk Jr. |
| Language | English |
| Subject | English language; Rhetoric; Style guide |
| Genre | Nonfiction; Reference |
| Publisher | Privately Printed |
Publication date | 1918 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (pamphlet); e-book |
| Pages | 43 |
| Goodreads rating | 4.2/5 (as of 8 November 2025) |
| Website | gutenberg.org |
📘 The Elements of Style is a concise American style guide compiled by Cornell English professor William Strunk Jr., first circulated in 1918 as a 43-page, privately printed handbook. [1] It presents compact rules of usage and principles of composition and famously urges writers to “omit needless words,” reflecting a brisk, prescriptive voice. [2] Harcourt, Brace republished the manual for general readers in 1920, establishing a chapter structure many reprints follow. [3] Influence widened after E. B. White revised and expanded it for Macmillan, published in late April 1959. [4] By its 50th anniversary in 2009, The New Yorker noted ten million copies sold. [5] In higher education, the Open Syllabus database ranks it the most frequently assigned text, appearing on more than 15,000 syllabi. [6]
Part I – Two Systems
Chapter 1 – Introductory
📘 A brief manual states its scope at the outset, promising to present the principal requirements of plain English style and to lighten the work of instructors and students by focusing on a few essentials. It limits punctuation to four high-yield rules—three for the comma and one for the semicolon—on the claim that these will handle the internal punctuation of nineteen out of twenty sentences. Composition guidance is likewise narrowed to broadly useful principles, with the reminder that the book covers only a small part of the field. Section numbers are meant to be used when marking manuscripts, turning the guide into a practical correction tool. The text acknowledges help from colleagues in Cornell’s Department of English and credits George McLane Wood for material incorporated under Rule 10. It directs readers to authoritative references, including the Chicago manual, Oxford’s house rules, and the Government Printing Office style book, for fuller treatment and examples. It cautions that expert writers sometimes break rules, but the prudent writer follows them until mastery allows informed deviation. In short, disciplined minimalism—few high-yield rules, applied consistently—lets clarity emerge from constraint and practice. This book aims to give in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style.
Chapter 2 – Elementary Rules of Usage
🧭 Begin with possession: form the singular possessive by adding ’s even after a final s—“Charles’s friend,” “Burns’s poems”—with traditional exceptions for ancient names, “Jesus’,” and idioms like “for conscience’ sake.” Lists follow: use the serial comma—“red, white, and blue”; “He opened the letter, read it, and made a note of its contents”—but omit the final comma in business names such as “Brown, Shipley & Co.” That list practice is also the usage of the Government Printing Office and the Oxford University Press. Parenthetic expressions are enclosed with paired commas, shown by a clean model (“The best way to see a country, unless you are pressed for time, is to travel on foot.”) and by cautionary contrasts between nonrestrictive and restrictive clauses (“The audience, which …” versus “The candidate who …”). Dates and abbreviations get concrete treatment (“Monday, November 11, 1918”; “etc.”; “jr.”), alongside place and time clauses (“Nether Stowey, where Coleridge wrote …”; “The day will come when …”). A comma precedes a conjunction joining independent clauses, with attention to when subordination reads better or when an adverbial link suggests a semicolon. The rules bar comma splices, warn against splitting one sentence into two, and require that an initial participial phrase refer to the grammatical subject, exemplified by “Young and inexperienced, I thought the task easy.” The aim is to make structure visible: consistent cues—serial commas, matched brackets, sound linkage, and anchored modifiers—reduce ambiguity and keep sentences moving. Do not join independent clauses by a comma.
Chapter 3 – Elementary Principles of Composition
🏗️ A student revises a short paper, turning one topic into one paragraph and signaling a new step with the paragraph break. The topic sentence comes first as a guide, and the closing sentence resolves the promise made at the start. Verbs move to the foreground—use the active voice rather than there is and other weak predicates—so a description like dead leaves covered the ground reads cleaner and stronger than a diffuse alternative. Negatives become firm positives: make definite assertions and prefer clear claims to hedged denials. Vague generalities give way to definite, specific, concrete language, replacing the fact that and similar padding with leaner terms such as because, although, and whether. The page tightens further by cutting superfluities—who is and which was when they add nothing—and by avoiding a run of loose, two-clause sentences that drain energy. Parallel structure aligns co-ordinate ideas, a principle familiar from The Ten Commandments, The Beatitudes, and the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. Clarity deepens as related words are kept together, summaries hold to one tense, and the most important word or phrase is placed at the end for emphasis. These moves compress and cohere prose: act with strong verbs, focus each unit, and finish with end-weight so readers grasp the point without friction. Omit needless words.
Chapter 4 – A Few Matters of Form
🧾 A manuscript page is prepared with small, regular decisions: leave a blank line after a heading; write dates and serial numbers in figures or Roman numerals—August 9, 1918; Chapter XII; Rule 3; 352nd Infantry—and keep the surface neat. Parentheses behave as detachable parts: the sentence outside is punctuated as if the parenthesis were absent, while the words inside take their own marks unless the last is a question or exclamation. Formal documentary quotations come after a colon and sit within quotation marks, while quotations that are direct objects or in apposition take a comma instead; examples range from a constitutional clause to lines attributed to La Rochefoucauld and Aristotle. References belong in parentheses or footnotes with compact notation rather than in the sentence body, and they omit words like act, scene, line, book, and page when other cues suffice; the model formats a Bible passage (2 Samuel i:17–27) and a play citation (Othello ii.iii. 264–267, iii.iii. 155–161). Syllabication at line ends follows sense and legibility: divide only when real syllables remain and avoid leaving awkward single letters. Standardized spacing, numerals, references, and breaks encode structure before words are read, producing uniform pages that spare readers guesswork. Do not spell out dates or other serial numbers.
Chapter 5 – Words and Expressions Commonly Misused
🚫 On a marked page of student prose, familiar formulae crowd the margins—as to whether, the fact that, case, factor, feature, interesting, one of the most—and the remedy is not a swap of synonyms but a full recast. The section sorts offenders into three groups: forms that are bad English (“like I did”), forms often defended but generally disfavored (the split infinitive), and formulas that should be rebuilt rather than patched. It then works case by case: All right is always two words; but is needless after doubt or help; can is ability, not permission; case is usually superfluous; compare to draws likenesses while compare with invites discrimination; consider meaning “believe to be” is not followed by as; data is plural. Due to belongs as a predicate or modifier to a noun; effect (result/bring about) is kept distinct from affect (influence); etc. closes lists rather than hides missing specifics; fact names what can be verified. The list trims vagueness and redundancy (He is a man who…, kind of or sort of, line/along these lines, most for almost) and sets idiom and position (however mid-sentence; like with nouns and pronouns, as before clauses; near by as adverbial only; oftentimes archaic; one of the most a threadbare opener). It regularizes grammar and form—possessive before a gerund (my asking), people versus the public, possess versus have, the often needless respectively, the standard shall/will contrast—and checks padding such as student body and system. Thanking you in advance is flagged as officious; very is rationed; while is not a stand-in for and or but; whom is not to replace who when the pronoun is a subject; worth while is restricted to actions; would yields to should in first-person conditionals. The entry on they bars a plural pronoun for distributive antecedents like each or anybody. Precision comes from reconstruction: choose the exact idiom, cut padding, and restore standard grammar so every connective, pronoun, and modifier earns its place. Less refers to quantity, fewer to number.
Chapter 6 – Spelling
🔤 In a compositor’s proof, unaccepted simplifications such as tho for though distract the reader and waste attention; spelling rests on general agreement rather than private experiment. The section notes that for most words the agreement is settled, and in the immediate list rime for rhyme is the lone allowable variant. “Words Often Misspelled” gathers common traps—ecstasy, embarrass, separate, siege, shepherd, playwright, principal and principle, rhythm, sacrilegious, seize, villain—alongside near-twins like coarse/course and affect/effect. A short rule doubles a single final consonant after a stressed short vowel before -ed and -ing (planned, letting, beginning), with coming named as an exception. It prescribes hyphens for to-day, to-night, and to-morrow, but not when written together. It also keeps certain compounds and pronouns in two words—any one, every one, some one, some time (except formerly)—and normalizes forms that drift in practice (impostor, occurred, opportunity, parallel, prejudice, privilege, repetition, rhyme, rhythm). Standard forms and a few fixed patterns keep attention on meaning, not letters, so the surface reads smooth. Write any one, every one, some one, some time (except in the sense of formerly) as two words.
Chapter 7 – Exercises on Chapters II and III
📝 Practice begins with a history paragraph to punctuate: in 1788 the King’s advisers and the summoning of the States-General, troops massed at Versailles, and the Paris militia seizing arms at the Invalides and the Bastille. A second passage tracks Byron’s 1809 tour through Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, and Turkey and the 1811 publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, to be punctuated and balanced. Students then explain differences between two printings of a couplet from Lyrical Ballads (1798 versus 1800), learning how a comma or spelling shift alters sense. The next set asks for diagnosis and correction of punctuation—nonrestrictive clauses mis-commad, an advertisement fragment that needs completion, a two-sentence split where one would serve, and a Jerusalem travel note about twenty-six Russian pilgrims that requires structure. The longest section collects everyday faults to repair: dangling participles, ambiguous modifiers, off-kilter comparisons, misused while and however, and missing series commas; examples range from Count Cassini’s conference conversations with Sir Arthur Nicholson to a Dean’s difficulty explaining a student’s offense and a fire-kindling narrative with potato-stalks and dry chips that needs trimming. Business-style closers on earnings and “status of affairs” test concision without sacrificing accuracy. Fix what is on the page until grammar, punctuation, and emphasis hold together; repeated, concrete rewriting turns the rules from Chapters II and III into habits the hands can perform.
—Note: The above summary follows the Harcourt, Brace and Company edition (1920).[3] First-edition bibliographic details (Ithaca: Privately Printed, 1918; 43 pp.) are confirmed by HathiTrust.[1]
Background & reception
🖋️ Author & writing. Strunk, a professor of English at Cornell, assembled the handbook to state “in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style,” concentrating on a few essentials rather than exhaustive rules. [2] The original was privately printed in 1918 at 43 pages; Harcourt, Brace republished it in 1920 with the familiar sequence of usage rules, composition principles, matters of form, and lists of misused and misspelled words. [1][3] In March 1957, a copy reached E. B. White at The New Yorker, prompting his “Letter from the East” about Strunk and, soon after, Macmillan’s invitation to create a revised edition; White added a new chapter on style and lightly modernized the text. [4] The result retained Strunk’s crisp prescriptions—“omit needless words” chief among them—while broadening the guidance for mid-century readers. [2]
📈 Commercial reception. The Strunk–White edition appeared in late April 1959; it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in May, had 60,000 copies in print by August, and sold about 200,000 copies in its first year while charting across major bestseller lists. [4] By 2009, The New Yorker marked ten million copies sold. [5]
👍 Praise. Contemporary notices were enthusiastic: The New York Times urged, “Buy it, study it, enjoy it,” and The New Yorker praised its “brevity, clarity, and prickly good sense.” [4] Later accolades include Time’s 2011 list of the 100 best and most influential nonfiction books in English. [7] In 2016, The Guardian placed the 1959 edition at No. 23 in its “100 best nonfiction books” series. [8]
👎 Criticism. Some linguists argue that the book’s prescriptions oversimplify grammar or misdescribe constructions. Geoffrey K. Pullum’s widely cited Chronicle essay contends that much standard advice in Strunk & White is inconsistent and mistaken, especially on the passive voice. [9] The New Yorker has framed these disputes within the larger prescriptivist–descriptivist debate in English usage. [10] Detailed discussions from academic linguists likewise explain why blanket bans on the passive are misguided and how passives actually work in English. [11]
🌍 Impact & adoption. In teaching, the Open Syllabus database consistently ranks The Elements of Style as the most-assigned text, with more than 15,000 appearances across college syllabi. [6] The book has also inspired adaptations and new formats: Penguin published an illustrated edition by Maira Kalman (paperback, 2007), and the New York Public Library hosted a sold-out 2005 song-cycle by Kalman and composer Nico Muhly based on the text. [12][13]
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References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "The elements of style / by William Strunk, Jr". HathiTrust Digital Library. HathiTrust. Retrieved 8 November 2025.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "The Elements of Style (1918/1920 text)". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 8 November 2025.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 "The elements of style" (PDF). Internet Archive. Cornell University Library. Retrieved 8 November 2025.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 "Word Perfect". Cornell Alumni Magazine. Retrieved 8 November 2025.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Elements and Elegance: Fifty Years". The New Yorker. 15 April 2009. Retrieved 8 November 2025.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "The Open Syllabus Project Visualizes the 1,000,000+ Books Most Frequently Assigned in College Courses". Open Culture. 18 February 2021. Retrieved 8 November 2025.
- ↑ "Elements of Style". Time. Time USA, LLC. 16 August 2011. Retrieved 8 November 2025.
- ↑ McCrum, Robert (4 July 2016). "The 100 best nonfiction books: No 23 – The Elements of Style by William Strunk and EB White (1959)". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 November 2025.
- ↑ Geoffrey K. Pullum (17 April 2009). "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" (PDF). University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 8 November 2025.
- ↑ Acocella, Joan (14 May 2012). "The English Wars". The New Yorker. Retrieved 8 November 2025.
- ↑ Geoffrey K. Pullum (24 January 2011). "The passive in English". Language Log (University of Pennsylvania). Retrieved 8 November 2025.
- ↑ "The Elements of Style Illustrated". Penguin Random House. 28 August 2007. Retrieved 8 November 2025.
- ↑ "LIVE from NYPL: The Elements of Style: A Short Happy Evening of Song with Maira Kalman and Nico Muhly". New York Public Library. 20 October 2005. Retrieved 8 November 2025.