The Elements of Strunk

Behold The Elements of Strunk , created by a predictive text emulator working with the 1918 edition of The Elements of Style . The project is the work of Jamie Brew.

The prose of The Elements of Strunk often has an oracular Steinian beauty. Five discontinous samples:

In spring summer or winter sentences should be avoided.

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The paragraph is the only allowable variation of the sentence.

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Each paragraph is a man or an old mansion.

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By itself, a comma is a portrait of a guitar. This is entirely correct.

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A sentence must be feminine or better.

I learned about The Elements of Strunk from a post by a well-known hater of The Elements of Style . No matter: The Elements of Strunk can appeal to those who love or loathe Strunk and White, or to those (like me) whose responses are mixed.

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10:40 a.m.: Oh, wait — there’s also a Twitter account.

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10:53 a.m.: Oh, wait — Brew (and the hater) identify The Elements of Strunk as made from the 1918 text of The Elements of Style, but that text has no guitar. Not does it have other distinctive Elements of Strunk elements: Coleridge, Harper’s Magazine , Trafalgar, and so on. Brew must have used a later edition of The Elements of Style as revised by E. B. White. The fourth edition has Coleridge, Harper’s , and Trafalgar, with a guitar in the glossary of grammatical terms.

Related reading
All OCA Strunk and White posts (Pinboard)

[Steinian: as in Gertrude.]