The Elements of Style, one more time

William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. The Elements of Style. 4th ed. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2000. $9.95.

Recent debate about the value of The Elements of Style prompted me to do what I had not done in perhaps twenty years: read the book straight through. Here's what I found:

The most appealing aspect of The Elements is its case for a style of writing that exhibits, in E.B. White's words, "cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity," "plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity." Such a style requires, William Strunk says, "not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell." Or as Ezra Pound advises poets in his essay "A Few Don'ts" (1913), "Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something." Given the available evidence of Strunk's literary interests, I sense not Poundian influence but coincidence: a shared preoccupation with condensation and clarity, a shared disdain for 19th-century floridity and pomp, what Pound elsewhere calls "mush."

The Elements makes its case for a plain style with generosity and flexibility. Choices in writing are "somewhat a matter of individual preference," we're told. With questions of usage, "we have no lawgiver whose word is final." So much depends upon a good ear: "The question of ear is vital." The book's final chapter, "An Approach to Style" (by E.B. White), meditates upon the difficulty and mystery of good writing, offering tips, "gentle reminders," for those making their way in the dark: "Do not construct awkward adverbs"; "Use figures of speech sparingly."

There is little that's gentle in the preceding chapter, "Words and Expressions Commonly Misused," which covers what so-called sticklers seem to have in mind when they speak of Strunk and White: the misuse of such words as fewer and less, imply and infer, lie and lay. Recommendations here seem at times arbitrary: by what reasoning is insightful bad and perceptive good? And the tone is sometimes haughty. Re: flammable and gasoline trucks: "Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable." Re: prestigious: "It's in the dictionary, but that doesn't mean you have to use it."

The sniffiness in such remarks is evidence of what seems to me the strongest case against the continued pedagogical usefulness of The Elements of Style: the world of the book's sample sentences is dowdy, a bit snobbish, and very white. For example:

For two dollars you can call your mother in London and tell her all about George's taking you out to dinner.

Her father and mother arrived by the afternoon train.

Once a year he visited the old mansion.

She entered her boat in the round-the-island race.

The contents of a jar may be either singular or plural, depending on what's in the jar — jam or marbles.

My favorite sentence of this sort:

Mr. Oglethorp was chair of the meeting.

I suspect that the meeting was of the Downtown Merchants Association, about the children riding their bicycles on the sidewalks after school. Why, just last week Mrs. Oglethorp's sister was visiting, and she had gone downtown to buy some thread, and as she was leaving the store —

That's enough.

My point has nothing to do with so-called political correctness. It's more a matter of temporal correctness: afternoon trains and jars of marbles fit some versions of mid-20th-century life, but not an early-21st-century book of writing instruction. Yet these sentences are the stuff of The Elements of Style; some have become the stuff of art and music in Maira Kalman's illustrated version of the book (2005) and Nico Muhly's Elements song cycle (2005). I cannot imagine changing these sentences, any more than I can imagine equipping the denizens of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks with iPhones. Mr. Oglethorp must remain chair, even if the downtown stores are gone. It's perhaps relevant that The Elements of Style as we know it — Strunk and White — began with nostalgia: the unexpected gift to White in 1957 of a memory-triggering copy of Strunk's original Elements, a book White had last seen in 1919.

Datedness is evident too in the advice The Elements offers about manuscript preparation. "Keep righthand and lefthand margins roughly the same width"; "When a word must be divided at the end of a line, consult a dictionary to learn the syllables between which division should be made": these bits of advice, still in the fourth edition, date from 1959, the world of the typewriter. The following advice about documenting sources, first appearing in Strunk's 1918 Elements, is unchanged in the 2000 edition:

In scholarly work requiring exact references, abbreviate titles that occur frequently, giving the full forms in an alphabetical list at the end. As a general practice, give the references in parentheses or in footnotes, not in the body of the sentence.

Yes, it's as if MLA and APA guidelines did not exist, and in 1918, of course, they didn't, though the Chicago Manual of Style predates The Elements. But woe unto a student in 2009 who thinks The Elements is all one needs to know about managing sources.

Or all one needs to know about any number of writing matters — how to develop paragraphs, for instance, about which the book says little. The Elements of Style is useful though not as an all-purpose reference but as a source of inspiration. Chapters Two and Five ("Elementary Principles of Composition," "An Approach to Style") in particular can serve to keep the writer at the task of caring for words and sentences, cutting here, rearranging there, refusing, at all points, to settle. The Elements of Style may work best as a writer's talisman. That's the best explanation I can offer of the book's long-lived pseudo-sacred status.

[I consulted all editions of The Elements of Style: 1918, 1959, 1979, 2000, 2005, 2009. The 2009 fiftieth-anniversary hardcover reprints the text of the fourth edition, adding a very brief account of the book's history and four pages of tributes from writers and public figures.]

All posts on the great Strunk and White debate
Pullum on Strunk and White
Hardly (adverb) convincing (adjective)
Strunk and White and wit
More on Pullum, Strunk, White

On Maira Kalman, Nico Muhly, William Strunk Jr., and E.B. White
Elements of Style Goes Beyond Words (NPR)

"The kids"

My daughter Rachel and my son Ben made an appearance in the first post I wrote for Orange Crate Art, wherein I thanked them for getting me started writing online. They were "the kids" then, teenagers.

Today Rachel graduates from college, wearing a "cabin gown" — many years ago, she thought that's what they were called. (Congradulations, Rachel!) And Ben turns twenty. (Happy birthday, Ben!) "The kids" are now my daughter the linguist and my son the philosopher, having grown up into grown-ups, not quite out of the family orbit yet, but moving off into orbits of their own. Does that make them rogue planets? My astronomy metaphors are clumsy at best.

When I began writing Orange Crate Art in 2004 (as a place to collect items relevant to my teaching), I never thought I'd be writing about my children, except to thank them for getting me started. I have of course written about them many times since then. This post is to salute them for their generosity, humor, imagination, kindness, and wisdom — and whatever else I've left out.

[Photograph by Elaine Fine, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 15, 2009.]

Related posts
Big Day, Huge Feelings (Elaine's post today)
Happy Father's Day (with a c. 1990 photo)
Things my children no longer say (e.g., "cabin gown")

Hi and Lois in search of lost time

Indeed.

[Mort Walker and Dik Browne, two panels from Hi and Lois, October 7, 1963, in The Best of “Hi and Lois” (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005), n.p.]

ΦΒΚ

Matching father-daughter copies of Phi Beta Kappa's Key Reporter. My daughter Rachel was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa tonight. Κῦδος, kiddo.

I know that Rachel finds the idea of matching father-daughter magazines as amusing as I do. That is, mildly amusing. A bit arch, a tad droll. Sherry? Yes, I would, thank you.

The pre-event background music: Handel's Water Music, followed by rain followed by hail followed by rain.

Positive emotions and risk

The June 2009 Atlantic has a long piece by Joshua Wolf Shenk, "What Makes Us Happy?" Shenk looks at the Grant Study, a longitudinal study (begun in 1937) of 268 Harvard men, and talks with George Vaillant, professor at Harvard Medical School and psychiatrist. Vaillant is the longtime director of the study, associated with it for more than forty years.

I find the following passage especially resonant. Shenk is recounting Vaillant's explanation to a group of graduate students of why "positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones":

One reason is that they're future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs — protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections — but in the short term actually put us at risk. That's because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his "prize" Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. "On his 70th birthday," Vaillant said, "when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, 'Would you write a letter of appreciation?' And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters — often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him." Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. "George, I don't know what you're going to make of this," the man said, as he began to cry, "but I've never read it." "It's very hard," Vaillant said, "for most of us to tolerate being loved."

Voluptuous Full-figured

Before: "Ancient Figurine of Voluptuous Woman Is Found."

After: "Full-Figured Statuette, 35,000 Years Old, Provides New Clues to How Art Evolved."

The New York Times has changed its voluptuous headline.

Deer on a wet red roof

[Fake deer atop a pawnshop, somewhere in East-Central Illinois, May 13, 2009. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Stormy weather

David Foster Wallace, writing of life in East-Central Illinois:

Most days from late March to June there are Tornado Watches somewhere in our TV stations' viewing area (the stations put a little graphic at the screen's upper right, like a pair of binoculars for a Watch and the Tarot deck's Tower card for a Warning, or something). Watches mean conditions are right and so on and so forth, which, big deal. It's only the rarer Tornado Warnings, which require a confirmed sighting by somebody with reliable sobriety, that make the Civil Defense sirens go.

David Foster Wallace, "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley," in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (New York: Back Bay Books, 1997), 15.

Our siren — I mean my town's siren — went this morning, at around 1:00. Elaine and I went downstairs, turned on the television, and watched the one station with a weatherman (not a crawl) until the storm passed about a half-hour later. No signs of damage in the daylight, only water, water everywhere, and more rain expected today or tomorrow.

Wilco streams Wilco (The Album)

Wilco is now streaming Wilco (The Album), scheduled for June 30 release. My knowledge of Wilco is not great, but I know enough to say that I like them. A first impression: this album seems to grow more Beatlesque as it goes on.

Voluptuous headline

An arresting headline: "Ancient Figurine of Voluptuous Woman Is Found." Voluptuous: from the Latin voluptas, pleasure. See what you think:

Ancient Figurine of Voluptuous Woman Is Found (New York Times)