Unmanning Strunk &amp White;

All the same, White was an amiable and disarming writer, the kind whose influence, if you discover it at a certain age, is almost always wholesome and hard to shake off. He was just a journalist but a superior one. His legacy, as the legacy of deadline writers tends to be, consists not of any one or two great works but of the desultory leavings that survive a fifty-year career in the trade: perhaps a half-dozen enduring essays, a few memorable scraps of light verse, a long and enjoyable volume of letters, and three well-loved children’s books, including Charlotte’s Web. It’s a pretty fair basket of goods. And of course it includes The Elements of Style, which has just been revised for the first time since White’s death in 1985.

This is the fourth edition of The Elements of Style. Since its commercial debut in 1959, it has sold more than ten million copies, at an average clip of a quarter-million a year, making it easily the most successful American text-book ever published. This spring, Random House’s Modern Library, in yet another gimmicky millennial list, placed The Elements at number twenty-one on its selection of the hundred best nonfiction books of the century; not to be outdone, a few months later a team of New York City librarians chose it as one of their “twenty-one classics for the twenty-first century.”

For durability and popular appeal, The Elements of Style has to be reckoned more than a textbook. But why this should be so is not at all clear. The little book is often praised for reasons that seem suspect. In an afterword to the new edition, the CBS news personality Charles Osgood boasts of carrying the book in his pocket at all times. (Osgood is one of those TV commentators who is known among his peers as a “writer’s writer”; and like other great TV stylists he employs a ghostwriter. Maybe he means he pockets the ghostwriter, who carries The Elements for him.) The implication of such boasts — Osgood is not the first to make it — is that a careful writer must have the book constantly at the ready, to settle a dispute about, say, the use of the conditional in the subjunctive mood.

The only problem is that, as a comprehensive guide to grammar and usage, The Elements is nearly useless. Running fewer than a hundred pages in most editions, it is not a sweeping survey of the scene, and was never intended to be. Its design consists of eleven “Elementary Rules of Usage,” eleven “Elementary Principles of Composition,” a chapter on “Matters of Form,” another on “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused,” a closing essay on the act of writing — and that’s it. (The new edition adds a glossary, which makes the book more serviceable than its predecessors, but only slightly.) The “rules” and “principles” are maddeningly spotty; vast areas of grammar go unmentioned altogether. If Osgood really wants to settle those heated arguments about syntax that must erupt routinely among the craftsmen in the CBS news-room — or, for that matter, if a student just wants to know what the hell an appositive is — he will be better off leaving The Elements in his pocket and buying a copy of the MLA Style Manual or any one of a dozen others that actually treat the subject with encyclopedic breadth and detail.

No, Charles Osgood notwithstanding, The Elements of Style is something else entirely — something much less than many of its partisans pretend, and something much greater, too.

The eccentric design of the book makes sense in light of its origins. The Elements of Style was first published in 1918 by its author, a Cornell professor named Will Strunk. Strunk himself was the one who tagged The Elements “the little book.” He printed it privately for classroom use by students in his composition course, among whom was E. B. White. Nearly forty years later, in the spring of 1957, White received a surviving copy in the mail from an old college friend. Charmed, he set down an appreciation of the book and its author for the New Yorker.

“‘The little book’ has long since passed into disuse,” he wrote. “Will died in 1946, and he had retired from teaching several years before that. Longer, lower textbooks are in use in English classes nowadays, I dare say — books with upswept tail fins and automatic verbs. I hope some of them manage to compress as much wisdom into as small a space, manage to come to the point as quickly and amusingly.”

The day after White’s essay appeared an editor at Macmillan took the hint — if a hint is what White intended — and wrote him asking to see a copy of Strunk’s book and wondering whether White’s piece might be used as an introduction to a new edition. White sent along his copy, with a note expressing some reservations. “Whether the book has virtues that would recommend it to teachers of English, I don’t feel qualified to say. . . . Sometimes the book, like the man, seems needlessly compressed, and it is undeniably notional.” He mentioned its lack of comprehensiveness, the large gaps in its survey of grammar and usage. White had a theory to explain this odd construction. “I think [Strunk] felt the need for a labor-saving device in correcting papers. With the ‘little book’ in the hands of his students, he could simply write in the margin of a theme: ‘See Rule 2.'”

Despite his doubts, White offered his help if Macmillan wanted to reissue the book. He had two conditions. First, though Strunk’s copyright had lapsed, Macmillan would have to get permission from his heirs and pay them royalties. (To this day royalties are split equally between the White and Strunk families — a handsome annuity that must amount to several hundred thousand dollars.) And second, he wanted the chance to comb through the book, bring it up to date, and offer some of his own thoughts on the subject of rhetoric.

Though always a slow worker, he thought the project would take him a month. It took nearly two years.

“I discovered,” he wrote many years later, “that for all my fine talk I was no match for the parts of speech — was, in fact, over my depth and in trouble. Not only that, I felt uneasy at posing as an expert on rhetoric, when the truth is I write by ear, always with difficulty and seldom with any exact notion of what is taking place under the hood.”

There were other problems. As White dug into the book its inadequacies became more apparent. “Omit needless words,” Strunk had written in Rule Seventeen, and the professor had followed his own advice so rigorously that he often omitted essential words, too. Some of his entries were not merely concise but incomprehensible. Others, conversely, were written with a bagginess unbecoming a book on rhetoric. White recast them, put them in his own voice, and in so doing gave the sharp, uncompromising rules a surprisingly light and agreeable tone. He went at the text with a free hand — always careful, he said, to preserve “the spirit of Strunk.”

In E. B. White: A Biography, Scott Elledge offers several examples of White’s recastings. All are improvements. For instance, under Rule Twelve, “Use definite, specific, concrete language,” Strunk had been inappropriately verbose: Critics have pointed out how much of the effectiveness of the greatest writers, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, results from their constant definiteness and concreteness. In White’s hands, the rule becomes concrete and the sentence snaps: The greatest writers — Homer, Dante, Shakespeare — are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter.

White greatly expanded Strunk’s chapter on “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused,” dropped a chapter on spelling, and added a funny, inspiriting essay on style. And so Will Strunk’s book became an E. B. White book — or better, it became Strunk-and-White, as it’s known today, a blend of the professor and the practitioner, the prickly old pedagogue and his most talented student.

There was one other element to The Elements that White refused to tamper with — the sternness that White himself most admired about the original and its author. Much of The Elements is a rule book; it is prescriptive, a study in right and wrong. As White prepared his revision, the new Webster’s International Dictionary hit the book-stores in a burst of publicity. It was the first great dictionary organized according to the “descriptivist” principle: the notion that, in the chaotic swirl of an ever-changing language, lexicographers “should have no traffic with artificial notions of correctness or superiority. [They] should be descriptive and not prescriptive.” Descriptivists imported relativism into the study and teaching of English; and having seized the new Webster’s, they threatened to carry every other guide to grammar and usage with them.

The editors at Macmillan got jittery. They farmed the manuscript out to several professional grammarians, who unanimously denounced the book’s unyielding ethic — its insistence, for example, on such “lost causes” as the difference between like and as, or will and shall. White’s editor passed along their objections, with hints that the revised Elements of Style should conform more closely to “modern educational theory.” White’s reply is worth quoting at length. Forty years on, it still has the power to invigorate a failing prescriptivist heart.

I was saddened by your letter — the flagging spirit, the moistened finger in the wind, the examination of entrails, and the fear of little men. I don’t know whether Macmillan is running scared or not, but I do know that this book is the work of a dead precisionist and a half-dead disciple of his, and that it has got to stay that way. I have been sympathetic all along with your qualms about “The Elements of Style,” but I know that I cannot, and will-shall not, adjust the unadjustable Mr. Strunk to the modern liberal of the English Department, the anything-goes fellow. I am against him, temperamentally and because I have seen the work of his disciples, and I say the hell with him. . . . Either Macmillan takes Strunk and me in our bare skins, or I want out.

To me no cause is lost, no level the right level, no smooth ride as valuable as a rough ride, no like interchangeable with as, and no ball game 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. Any attempt to tamper with this prickly design will get nobody nowhere fast.

White won the argument, and the book was published in 1959 as he revised it, “in the spirit of Strunk.” The trade edition quickly perched atop the bestseller list and stayed for several months. Its college edition sold half a million copies in the first three years. White made two subsequent revisions, in 1972 and in 1979; he left the design intact but added substantially to the section on “Words Commonly Misused,” piling up expressions that had come to annoy him in the intervening years.

Every book on words and how to use them is, to one degree or another, a grab bag of its author’s crotchets and punctilios, and this is doubly true for The Elements of Style, which assembles the prejudices of not one irascible language maven but two. White’s disdain fell particularly hard on words he thought carried the odor of the pompous, the inexact, or the trendy. The 1959 edition damned the then-new coinage personalize (“a pretentious word, often carrying bad advice”). The 1972 edition did the same to finalize (“a peculiarly fuzzy and silly word. . . . One can’t be sure what it means, and one gets the impression that the person using it doesn’t know, either, and doesn’t want to know”). By the 1979 edition, things had gotten so out of hand — with the invention of prioritize, customize, and the rest — that White composed a brief essay excommunicating all freshly made verbs ending in ize: “Never tack ize onto a noun to create a verb. Usually you will discover that a useful verb already exists. Why use moisturize when there is the simple, unpretentious word moisten?”

White was a master of what the professors call the American plain style, consisting mainly of straight-flowing sentences unimpeded by secondary clauses, with the subject, verb, and object bound closely together. It is hard to dissemble in the plain style, hard to show off. White’s taste, if taste can describe something so essential to a man’s character, is for the simple and unaffected; and it is stamped on every page of The Elements. About the overworked word insightful, he wrote: “Usually, it crops up merely to inflate the commonplace.” The objection is telling.

Unlike many precisionists, he was not against neologisms as a matter of principle — in the little book there are passages about the “organic” and “dynamic” nature of language that would please any descriptivist. But if the language is constantly renewing itself, as the descriptivists say, White wanted it to do so in the direction of clarity and precision, away from airiness and abstraction: Let new words illuminate meaning, not obscure it. He was against neologisms only of a certain kind. Consider finalize — what moves a man to coin the word, in place of “conclude” or “settle” or “complete”? Does it convey some subtlety of meaning these more commonplace synonyms do not? Unlikely. Instead, the fellow who finalizes is merely reaching for the word nearest at hand regardless of its sense, in which case he is lazy, or, alternatively, he is trying to sound official and authoritative, in which case he is just strutting. In neither case is he worthy of emulation.

In the same way, White counseled against such gassy nouns as “feature,” “factor,” and “dimension.” They are tools of obfuscation rather than expression; a sentence that relies heavily upon them may sound impressive at first hearing but is liable not to mean much of anything, which becomes apparent when you try to recast it into concrete words. White objected to the use of hopefully (standard meaning: “with hope”) for “it is to be hoped,” and presently (standard meaning: “soon”) for “currently.” A descriptivist will defend the new usages in the name of enriching our dynamic language. In fact, though, they diminish it. When, through constant misuse, fortuitous becomes synonymous with fortunate, imply with infer, comprise with constitute, the language shrinks and distinctions become harder to draw.

Many of these cavils are windmilltilting, of course. Finalize is probably here to stay, along with the new senses of hopefully and presently. Writerly crotchets, even those as sound as White’s, are often doomed, as he understood. But one of the intentions of Elements is to enliven the writer, to make him alert and self-conscious as he expresses himself, to induce him to assemble his own grab bag of phrases and words that he can’t abide for their pretentiousness, their cloudy meaning, or their confused purpose. And since White’s last revision in 1979, the list of such words has only grown. He would be disinclined to reach out to communicators whose writing skills lead them to tag every group a community, even when it is faith-based or meaningful. The state of the language today would plunge him into the grieving process.

Which only heightens the anticipation for the new revision of The Elements of Style. Over the last twenty years the book has grown whiskers — and not merely in its hidebound prejudices or its hardy prescriptivism. Students who bought the book last year, still in its 1979 incarnation, would have found Strunk and White railing against the old advertising slogan “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” which no one under the age of thirty has ever heard of. They would learn to leave plenty of space on the first page of a manuscript, so the editor will have room to make notations for the “compositor.” (Mommy, what’s a compositor?) And when they needed to revise a draft by transposing paragraphs, Elements advised them to cut the manuscript with scissors and physically rearrange the order of the material. The world of Strunk and White is a world of typewriters and pencils, not word processors.

Notwithstanding these antiquarian references, sales remained brisk. In 1994, the mergers and recombinations roiling the publishing industry kicked ownership of the book to Allyn and Bacon, a firm specializing in textbooks. “Here we had this wonderful title,” the company’s president, Bill Barke, told me the other day, “but it didn’t have A & B’s editorial imprint, if you see what I mean. There was a lot of datedness. I thought maybe we could provide our editorial input to updating it, combine it with our marketing clout, and really improve the performance of this product.”

Written by a pair of mossbacks, The Elements is a book beloved by mossbacks, and Barke was alert to the dangers of tampering with the text. “With a classic like this,” he said, “the real problem you get is that people think every word is kind of sacred.” He fished around among White’s surviving friends and colleagues for a new reviser — John Updike was approached, and so was White’s stepson, the great New Yorker writer Roger Angell — but they demurred. (“We could never finalize anything,” Barke said of the negotiations.)

In the end, the task of revising the little book was given over to a team of freelance copy editors, working with Allyn and Bacon’s own in-house editors. This is the bad news. (I’ll get to the good news in a moment.) Freelance copy editors are the curse of the publishing business. With publishers lopping off staff by the fistful, freelancers have acquired terrific power. As many writers have discovered, they tend to be of a type: working alone, over-schooled and undereducated, usually armed with degrees from the further reaches of the liberal arts curriculum — sociology, for example, or women’s studies. As a rule they are exquisitely sensitive to the marginal and the beside-the-point; they can spot an instance of gender or ethnic insensitivity at a hundred paces, even as typos, grammatical errors, factual misstatements, and egregious misspellings glide by them unnoticed.

They have made their mark on the fourth edition of The Elements of Style. In setting examples of correct and incorrect usage side by side, the format of the book has always been to put a poorly constructed sentence on the left and a corrected version on the right. And so it is in the new edition, with the exception of Rule Twenty (“Keep related words together”), where the correct and incorrect examples have been mistakenly, and rather obviously, transposed.

The error will doubtless cause some puzzlement in American classrooms; then again, maybe not. In any case it’s hard to see how this little glitch could have escaped the notice of professionals, until you look elsewhere under Rule Twenty and find the revision that must have truly concerned them. In the earlier editions, one of the good examples reads: “In the fifth book of The Excursion, Wordsworth gives a minute description of this church.” The revisers have dumped this, replacing it with an example of their own. In the fourth edition we now read: “In Beloved, Toni Morrison writes about characters who have escaped from slavery but are haunted by its heritage.”

“If people still read Wordsworth,” Barke told me, “we would have left him in. But they don’t. So we took him out.”

He’s got a point (Mommy, what’s a Wordsworth?), and the same reasoning probably forced the substitution of Sylvia Plath for Keats and of Sappho for Pliny the Younger in other examples. Even so, mossbacks sniffing through the new text in hopes of finding further evidence of political correctness will be largely disappointed. The new edition shows signs of only one overarching principle of revision, which is this: Almost every use of the male pronoun to encompass both men and women has been meticulously excised. Strunk and White, in their fourth edition, have been unmanned.

Sometimes the pronoun simply vanishes, leaving the original sentence otherwise intact. Where once we read “A writer may err by making his sentences too compact and periodic,” we now read: “A writer may err by making sentences too compact and periodic.”

On other occasions the sentence is purified through the use of participles. Where once we read “The unskilled writer often violates this principle, from a mistaken belief that he should constantly vary the form of his expression,” now we read: “The unskilled writer often violates this principle, mistakenly believing in the value of constantly varying the form of expression.” Sentence by sentence, line by line, “the writer” assumes a ghostly form.

The revisions aren’t as good as the originals, of course; there’s a loss of vigor and cadence in the loss of specificity. My own guess, though, is that most members of the mossback community will not find the changes particularly troublesome. The use of he for he and she will presently (by which I mean soon) be a lost cause. And if nothing else, this neutered edition will forestall many pointless, not to say insane, classroom arguments launched by feminist undergraduates who would have been appalled at the masculine tone of earlier editions (and who would later become freelance copy editors to get even).

But White, who as we’ve seen didn’t allow for lost causes, would probably have objected to the change. One of the last pieces he submitted to the New Yorker, where he had worked for fifty years, was a lampoon of the same unisex principle that has now altered his book. This was in the mid-1970s, and the piece was rejected. “To me,” he wrote an editor at the magazine, “any woman’s (or man’s) attempt to remove the gender from the language is both funny and futile.” Funny, maybe, but not at all futile.

For the 1979 edition of The Elements of Style, he wrote a little sermon on the subject:

The use of he as a pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginnings of the English language. He has lost all suggestion of maleness in these circumstances. . . . It has no pejorative connotation; it is never incorrect. Substituting he or she in its place is the logical thing to do if it works. But it often doesn’t work, if only because repetition makes it sound boring or silly. . . . Alternatively, put all the controversial nouns in the plural and avoid the choice of sex altogether, and you may find your prose sounding general and diffuse as a result.

And that, of course, is precisely what the new editors have often done — put the nouns in plural form, to de-sex them. And sure enough, the prose sounds general and diffuse as a result. What is truly remarkable, however, is that almost all of White’s antineutering sermon, as quoted above, stands unaltered in the new edition. The new editors have inserted a single sentence in the middle of it, as a hedge: “Currently, however, many writers find the use of the generic he or his to rename indefinite antecedents limiting or offensive.” Otherwise the passage is as White wrote it. His sentiment is still there, but now he sounds confused.

The same holds true throughout the new edition. The hoary disapprobations survive, no matter how out-of-step with the times: Don’t begin a sentence with however; abjure finalize, personalize, and prioritize; use the serial comma; avoid offputting and ongoing; don’t use people as a plural for person, nauseous as a synonym for nauseated, or like for as. Every one of the lost causes is still there. The compositor is still there! All that has really changed — aside from the defenestration of poor Wordsworth, Keats, and Pliny — is the de-sexing of the pronouns. This is odd, to say the least, in a text that is otherwise so thoroughly reactionary. But it is a tribute to the monomania of contemporary editors that the discordance is allowed to stand. As we say these days: Whatever. Just as long as you get the pronouns right.

So this is the good news: The little book endures, its strength only slightly diminished. Most important, White’s last chapter has been left largely untouched; for it is here, in the essay called “An Approach to Style,” that you come upon the book’s beating heart, the source of much of its power. Here, at the end, is where you glimpse what Strunk and White have been up to all along.

The essay appends to the body of the book twenty-one additional rules — though here, in contrast to the earlier sections, they are gently called “reminders.” “The preceding chapters,” White writes, “contain instructions drawn from established English usage; this one contains advice drawn from a writer’s experience of writing.” The tone is more relaxed, less formal, not at all censorious. The persnickety pedagogue has slipped offstage, and the reader finds himself in the pleasing company of the man who wrote Charlotte’s Web.

E. B. White was not notably a man of ideas. In politics, in fact, he was a bit of a booby. On those few occasions when he aspired to the pundit’s role, as the New Yorker’s editorial writer, it was to advance the woolly idea of “world government” after World War II. Wilfred Sheed once wrote that White embodied the spirit of the early New Yorker: “the spiritual home of the graceful writer with nothing to say.” (Of course, Sheed was writing of the period, blessed in memory, when New Yorker writers did have nothing to say.) “White,” he continued, “must be the archetype and all-time champion [of such writers].”

This isn’t entirely fair; if nothing else White was a writer who knew enough to stay away from words like archetype. He had things to say, but they were small things, seemingly. “He was quite wonderful,” wrote Joseph Epstein, in an otherwise dismissive essay on White, “at describing buildings at dusk, snow in the bright sun, a lake in the rain.” Small things, perhaps; but the smallness is deceptive. His work is cherished today (by those who cherish it) because what he offered in his writing was himself, suigeneris, E. B. White and no other — a man genial, tolerant, humorous, without artifice or pretense, and always with a half-moon of melancholy rising up against the backdrop. To fashion a style that allowed this self to show through so consistently and so indelibly, and over so long a span of years, must have been a difficult labor, an achievement attained at great cost: no small thing.

“An Approach to Style” is, oddly enough, an extended brief against style, as style is generally understood. “Young writers,” he wrote,

often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable. The beginner should approach style warily . . . by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style — all mannerisms, tricks, adornments. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.

Each of White’s twenty-one reminders nudges aspiring writers in this healthy direction, with advice they almost certainly don’t want to hear. “Place yourself in the background.” “Write with nouns and verbs.” “Do not overwrite.” “Do not affect a breezy manner.” “Use orthodox spelling.” And finally, and most painfully for the young person aflame with the desire for self-expression: “Prefer the standard to the offbeat.”

There is a single consideration underlying all these reminders: concern for the other, for the reader. “Most readers,” White says, “are in trouble about half the time.” To neglect this fundamental fact — to indulge in obscurity for obscurity’s sake, to choose words carelessly, to ignore the rules of usage — is a kind of moral transgression. Concern for the reader is what moves White to counsel clarity, simplicity, the avoidance of pomp and pretense.

Two things strike you as you dwell on White’s reminders. First, he has touched on the very tendencies that lead a writer astray when he is bursting to express himself. And second, these are temptations that are not limited to the act of writing.

He closes the book with this advice:

Do not forget that what may seem like pioneering may be merely evasion, or laziness — the disinclination to submit to discipline. . . . In choosing between the formal and the informal, the regular and the off-beat, the general and the special, the orthodox and the heretical, the beginner [should] err on the side of conservatism, on the side of established usage. No idiom is taboo; no accent forbidden; there is simply a better chance of doing well if the writer holds a steady course, enters the stream of English quietly, and does not thrash about.

The Elements of Style is undeniably a great book — whether it ranks among the century’s twenty-one best is open to debate — and like many great books it pretends to be about one thing when in truth it is about another. It masquerades as a guide to usage but it is really a book about life — about the value of custom, the necessity of rules, the corruptions of vanity, the primacy of good taste, and the transcendent importance of always taking your fellows into account. This is what the book was about in the first edition, and it’s what it is about in the fourth; and it will be so — hopefully! — in the fifth and sixth and seventh editions, for as long as the little book survives.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.