Elements of Style, Strunk & White: A Review

Some of us had The Elements of Style forced upon us. Others of us sought it out for it's fabled wisdom and exacting measures of good and effective writing. This small book by William Strunk and his student E.B White is as concise as it counsels, but has an austerity about it that leaves you feeling uncomfortably constrained, even unsatisfied. And despite it's generally sound advice, you can't help feeling that strict adherence to its Procrustean set of rules might produce writing that is lacking, bereft of the richness, depth, complexity or whimsy that might make it more enjoyable, even more effective. Yet, it still sits on my desk, and I still consult it from time to time.

Peter Wood offers a thoughtful review of a new book on the subject, Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, By Mark Garvey (Touchstone 2009). Wood offers clear, balanced, insightful observations in his treatment of Garvey's 240 page work. For openers:

Strunk's is the voice of stern minimalism, a reaction against overstuffed Victorian furniture and a culture blurred into rhetorical complacency. Strunk (1869-1946) was a near contemporary of the famously laconic Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)—one of the few observations about Strunk's Great Rule that Mark Garvey does not make in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style...

"Omit needless words"—the gnomic Rule Thirteen in William Strunk's original 1918 self-published edition of The Elements of Style—is the kind of advice that means less and less the more you think about it. Which words are needless? What need are we talking about? Just conveying information or mood, too? Sublunary matters or glimpses of God?

Strunk's exposition of Rule Thirteen seems sensible, at least initially:

'Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.'

But these sentences soften under steady gaze. Vigorous writing is not always concise. Gibbon is not concise. Dickens can be, but isn't always. Unnecessary sentences abound in good writing, or some kinds of good writing—the kind that is companionable, humane, allusive, and willing to treat the reader as a friend, not a customer.

--"What Are Words Worth?" a review by Peter Wood, The American Conservative (1.01.10)

But Wood sympathizes with Garvey's efforts to get past Elements "fundamentalism" and to the heart of what Elements at its best is, to see how it can best be understood and used as a guide to better writing. Wood continues:

Garvey, however, is at his best in those passages where he attempts to take the heft of Strunk's preference for the spare. The Elements of Style, he says, "embodies a worldview." He explains:

'It is a book of promises—a promise that creative freedom is enabled, not hindered, by putting your faith in a few helpful rules; the promise that careful, clear thinking and writing can occasionally touch truth; the promise of depth in simplicity and beauty in plainness; and the promise that by turning away from artifice and ornamentation you will find your true voice.'

Garvey is surely right to locate the enduring appeal of The Elements of Style in these largely unspoken promises. He is also right to pick out "Omit needless words" as the pivot of the Strunkian universe. That three-word command, he says, "continues to ring like a Lao Tzu aphorism at the book's center." I have known academic colleagues in whom this Zen-like rule, in its exacting, Bauhaus-on-the-page austerity, has taken full possession. They comb and re-comb every paragraph seeking perfect nudity. They do not rest until every vestment is torn away and every noun and verb stands blushing naked. And what remains is indeed clear and readable, like tracks in the desert sands.

Garvey never quite comes to terms with the desertification of English prose wrought by Strunk & White cultists. Perhaps it is because he is himself a devotee—though not the hard-core sort whose adoration of the purging of needless words leads their prose ever closer to that epitome of concision, the white pages of the telephone book. Instead, Garvey pleads the case that, rightly understood, Strunk's edict is capacious. It allows for good writing of many types and in many voices. Rule Thirteen is about clearing away clutter, uprooting obstacles, and bringing blessed order to the roiling chaos of our unfinished thoughts.

When Garvey urges this winsome Strunk—Strunk-the-judicious—my heart melts. But then I wonder: why have so many earnest people studied The Elements of Style and come away convinced that good writing involves squeezing every last drop from the grapefruit and then eating the rind? Do Strunk and his famous student E.B. White bear no responsibility for this heresy? After all, they preached a creed of clarity. Shouldn't their book be clear about its purpose? But if Garvey is right, a lot of readers have gone astray in The Elements of Style. They have imagined it a fundamentalist sect, when it is truly just an older brother's counsel.

With the sort of balance and freedom that Mr. Wood champions, I would recommend The Elements of Style to anyone who has not read it, young and old alike. You could do much worse than to give due consideration to Rule Thirteen, among the many others, but recognize that it is really best viewed as general guidance on how to strengthen writing, not denude it.

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2010/jan/01/00047/