Unmanning Strunk and White

...White's taste, if taste can describe something so essential to a man's character, is for the simple and unaffected...

...it is nondetachable, unfilterable...

...Nearly forty years later, in the spring of 1957, White received a surviving copy in the mail from an old college friend...

...In an afterword to the new edition, the CBS news personality Charles Osgood boasts of carrying the book in his pocket at all times...

...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...

...The little book' has long since passed into disuse," he wrote...

...White objected to the use of hopefully (standard meaning: "with hope") for "it is to be hoped," and presently (standard meaning: "soon") for "currently...

...As White dug into the book its inadequacies became more apparent...

...The day after White's essay appeared an editor at Macmillan took the hint—if a hint is what White intend-ed—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...

...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...

...and the same reasoning probably forced the substitution of Sylvia Plath for Keats and of Sappho for Pliny the Younger in other examples...

...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...

...if nothing else White was a writer who knew enough to stay away from words like archetype...

...Substituting he or she in its place is the logical thing to do if it works...

...Of course, Sheed was writing of the period, blessed in memory, when New Yorker writers did have nothing to say...

...Does it convey some subtlety of meaning these more commonplace synonyms do not...

...I am against him, temperamentally and because I have seen the work of his disciples, and I say the hell with him...

...Do not overwrite...

...He had things to say, but they were small things, seemingly...

...The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity...

...He's got a point (Mommy, what's a Wordsworth...

...An Approach to Style" is, oddly enough, an extended brief against style, as style is generally understood...

...He has lost all suggestion of male-ness in these circumstances...

...In E.B...

...To this day royalties are split equally between the White and Strunk families—a handsome annuity that must amount to several hundred thousand dollars...

...The 1972 edition did the same to finalize ("a peculiarly fuzzy and silly word...

...In 1994, the mergers and recombinations roiling the publishing industry kicked ownership of the book to Allyn and Bacon, a firm specializing in textbooks...

...No idiom is taboo...

...The new edition adds a glossary, which makes the book more serviceable than its predecessors, but only slightly...

...Strunk to the modern liberal of the English Department, the anything-goes fellow...

...All are improvements...

...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...

...And sure enough, the prose sounds general and diffuse as a result...

...abjure finalize, personalize, and prioritize...

...Do not affect a breezy manner...

...and like other great TV stylists he employs a ghostwriter...

...He was just a jourAndrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard...

...There were other problems...

...So we took him out...

...This year is the centenary of White's birth, and looking through the handful of news articles that have marked the occasion I see he's sometimes referred to, by newspaper editorialists, op-ed writers, and other enthusiasts, as "America's foremost man of letters" or even "the greatest essayist of the century...

...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...

...Writerly crotchets, even those as sound as White's, are often doomed, as he understood...

...The "rules" and "principles" are maddeningly spotty...

...Every one of the lost causes is still there...

...Unlikely...

...Notwithstanding these antiquarian references, sales remained brisk...

...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...

...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...

...The Elements of Style was first published in 1918 by its author, a Cornell professor named Will Strunk...

...Use orthodox spelling...

...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...

...Most important, White's last chapter has been left largely untouched...

...it is prescriptive, a study in right and wrong...

...The use of he for he and she will presently (by which I mean soon) be a lost cause...

...Any attempt to tamper with this prickly design will get nobody nowhere fast...

...His work is cherished today (by those who cherish it) because what he offered in his writing was himself, sui generis, E.B...

...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...

...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...

...avoid offputting and ongoing...

...If people still read Wordsworth," Barke told me, "we would have left him in...

...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...

...use the serial comma...

...vast areas of grammar go unmentioned altogether...

...White's disdain fell particularly hard on words he thought carried the odor of the pompous, the inexact, or the trendy...

...And finally, and most painfully for the young person aflame with the desire for self-expression: "Prefer the standard to the offbeat...

...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...

...The state of the language today would plunge him into the grieving process...

...And second, these are temptations that are not limited to the act of writing...

...He had two conditions...

...But White, who as we've seen didn't allow for lost causes, would probably have objected to the change...

...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...

...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...

...Running fewer than a hundred pages in most editions, it is not a sweeping survey of the scene, and was never intended to be...

...As we say these days: Whatever...

...Strunk himself was the one who tagged The Elements "the little book...

...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...

...Style has no such separate entity...

...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...

...and it is stamped on every page of The Elements...

...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...

...And that, of course, is precisely what the new editors have often done—put the nouns in plural form, to de-sex them...

...no accent forbidden...

...Either Macmillan takes Strunk and me in our bare skins, or I want out...

...Longer, lower textbooks are in use in English classes nowadays, I dare say— books with upswept tail fins and automatic verbs...

...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...

...Many of these cavils are windmill-tilting, of course...

...The revisions aren't as good as the originals, of course...

...Sometimes the pronoun simply vanishes, leaving the original sentence otherwise intact...

...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...

...White won the argument, and the book was published in 1959 as he revised it, "in the spirit of Strunk...

...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...

...With a classic like this," he said, "the real problem you get is that people think every word is kind of sacred...

...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...

...In neither case is he worthy of emulation...

...Strunk and White, in their fourth edition, have been unmanned...

...For durability and popular appeal, The Elements of Style has to be reckoned more than a textbook...

...The tone is more relaxed, less formal, not at all censorious...

...But why this should be so is not at all clear...

...Otherwise the passage is as White wrote it...

...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...

...White had a theory to explain this odd construction...

...Over the last twenty years the book has grown whiskers— and not merely in its hidebound prejudices or its hardy prescriptivism...

...The revisers have dumped this, replacing it with an example of their own...

...The objection is telling...

...He mentioned its lack of comprehensiveness, the large gaps in its survey of grammar and usage...

...They are tools of obfuscation rather than expression...

...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...

...This isn't entirely fair...

...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 textbook ever published...

...First, he has touched on the very tendencies that lead a writer astray when he is bursting to express himself...

...But it often doesn't work, if only because repetition makes it sound boring or silly...

...A humorous man with a high but realistic estimation of his gifts, White would have enjoyed the extravagance of the claim, coming at the end of a century that produced George Orwell, G.K...

...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...

...Others, conversely, were written with a bagginess unbecoming a book on rhetoric...

...White sent along his copy, with a note expressing some reservations...

...The only problem is that, as a comprehensive guide to grammar and usage, The Elements is nearly useless...

...White's editor passed along their objections, with hints that the revised Elements of Style should conform more closely to "modern educational theory...

...This is odd, to say the least, in a text that is otherwise so thoroughly reactionary...

...And since White's last revision in 1979, the list of such words has only grown...

...One of There is a single consideration underlying all White's reminders in The Elements of Style: concern for the reader...

...White's reply is worth quoting at length...

...The same holds true throughout the new edition...

...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...

...Even so, mossbacks sniffing through the new text in hopes of finding further evidence of political correctness will be largely disappointed...

...As many writers have discovered, they tend to be of a type: working alone, overschooled and undereducated, usually armed with degrees from the further reaches of the liberal arts curriculum— sociology, for example, or women's studies...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...The hoary disapprobations survive, no matter how out-of-step with the times: Don't begin a sentence with however...

...It is hard to dissemble in the plain style, hard to show off...

...don't use people as a plural for person, nauseous as a synonym for nauseated, or like for as...

...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...

...they can spot an instance of gender or ethnic insensitiv-ity at a hundred paces, even as typos, grammatical errors, factual misstate-ments, and egregious misspellings glide by them unnoticed...

...What is truly remarkable, however, is that almost all of White's anti-neutering sermon, as quoted above, stands unaltered in the new edition...

...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...

...Just as long as you get the pronouns right...

...White," he continued, "must be the archetype and all-time champion [of such writers...

...Each of White's twenty-one reminders nudges aspiring writers in this healthy direction, with advice they almost certainly don't want to hear...

...In the same way, White counseled against such gassy nouns as "feature," "factor," and "dimension...

...A descriptivist will defend the new usages in the name of enriching our dynamic language...

...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 was in the mid-1970s, and the piece was rejected...

...My own guess, though, is that most members of the mossback community will not find the changes particularly troublesome...

...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...

...White recast them, put them in his own voice, and in so doing gave the sharp, uncompromising rules a surprisingly light and agreeable tone...

...There was a lot of datedness...

...Written by a pair of mossbacks, The Elements is a book beloved by moss-backs, and Barke was alert to the dangers of tampering with the text...

...The trade edition quickly perched atop the bestseller list and stayed for several months...

...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...

...Charmed, he set down an appreciation of the book and its author for the New Yorker...

...We could never finalize anything," Barke said of the negotiations...

...Sentence by sentence, line by line, "the writer" assumes a ghostly form...

...Two things strike you as you dwell on White's reminders...

...He was against neologisms only of a certain kind...

...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...

...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 definite-ness and concreteness...

...Sometimes the book, like the man, seems needlessly compressed, and it is undeniably notional...

...Forty years on, it still has the power to invigorate a failing prescriptivist heart...

...this one contains advice drawn from a writer's experience of writing...

...There is a single consideration underlying all these reminders: concern for the other, for the reader...

...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...

...and having seized the new Webster's, they threatened to carry every other guide to grammar and usage with them...

...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...

...The beginner should approach style warily...

...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...

...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...

...Its college edition sold half a million copies in the first three years...

...Whether the book has virtues that would recommend it to teachers of English, I don't feel qualified to say...

...Place yourself in the background...

...So this is the good news: The little book endures, its strength only slightly diminished...

...In choosing between the formal and the informal, the regular and the offbeat, 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...

...Freelance copy editors are the curse of the publishing business...

...As a rule they are exquisitely sensitive to the marginal and the beside-the-point...

...This is the bad news...

...The persnickety pedagogue has slipped offstage, and the reader finds himself in the pleasing company of the man who wrote Charlotte's Web...

...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...

...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...

...First, though Strunk's copyright had lapsed, Macmillan would have to get permission from his heirs and pay them royalties...

...White: A Biography, Scott Elledge offers several examples of White's recastings...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Much of The Elements is a rule book...

...by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style—all mannerisms, tricks, adornments...

...there's a loss of vigor and cadence in the loss of specificity...

...and it will be so—hopefully!—in the fifth and sixth and seventh editions, for as long as the little book survives...

...Though always a slow worker, he thought the project would take him a month...

...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...

...His sentiment is still there, but now he sounds confused...

...But it is a tribute to the monomania of contemporary editors that the discordance is allowed to stand...

...As White prepared his revision, the new Webster's International Dictionary hit the bookstores in a burst of publicity...

...I think [Strunk] felt the need for a labor-saving device in correcting papers...

...He went at the text with a free hand— always careful, he said, to preserve "the spirit of Strunk...

...nalist but a superior one...

...It took nearly two years...

...Finalize is probably here to stay, along with the new senses of hopefully and presently...

...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...

...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...

...Maybe he means he pockets the ghostwriter, who carries The Elements for him...

...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...

...White was not notably a man of ideas...

...Mommy, what's a compositor...

...The eccentric design of the book makes sense in light of its origins...

...It has no pejorative connotation...

...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...

...The preceding chapters," White writes, "contain instructions drawn from established English usage...

...White made two subsequent revisions, in 1972 and in 1979...

...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...

...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...

...The editors at Macmillan got jittery...

...but the smallness is deceptive...

...then again, maybe not...

...Descriptivists imported relativism into the study and teaching of English...

...it is never incorrect...

...With publishers lopping off staff by the fistful, freelancers have acquired terrific power...

...On other occasions the sentence is purified through the use of participles...

...The compositor is still there...

...Usually you will discover that a useful verb already exists...

...Funny, maybe, but not at all futile...

...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...

...This is the fourth edition of The Elements of Style...

...In fact, though, they diminish it...

...It's a pretty fair basket of goods...

...He printed it privately for classroom use by students in his composition course, among whom was E.B...

...And of course it includes The Elements of Style, which has just been revised for the first time since White's death in 1985...

...About the overworked word insightful, he wrote: "Usually, it crops up merely to inflate the commonplace...

...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...

...Small things, perhaps...

...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...

...The little book is often praised for reasons that seem suspect...

...Will died in 1946, and he had retired from teaching several years before that...

...Most readers," White says, "are in trouble about half the time...

...And so Will Strunk's book became an E.B...

...The 1959 edition damned the then-new coinage personalize ("a pretentious word, often carrying bad advice...

...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...

...Write with nouns and verbs...

...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...

...Concern for the reader is what moves White to counsel clarity, simplicity, the avoidance of pomp and pretense...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...They] should be descriptive and not prescriptive...

...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...

...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...

...Which only heightens the anticipation for the new revision of The Elements of Style...

...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...

...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...

...Why use moisturize when there is the simple, unpretentious word moisten...

...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...

...White, who co-wrote "the little book" with William Strunk Jr...

...Here, at the end, is where you glimpse what Strunk and White have been up to all along...

...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...

...Chesterton, Rebecca West, Edmund Wilson— essayists who swung the heavy lumber and hit the long ball, as White, a miniaturist by inclination, did not and did not try to do...

...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...

...They have made their mark on the fourth edition of The Elements of Style...

...All that has really changed— aside from the defenestration of poor Wordsworth, Keats, and Pliny—is the de-sexing of the pronouns...

...Osgood is one of those TV commentators who is known among his peers as a "writer's writer...

...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...

...The error will doubtless cause some puzzlement in American classrooms...

...But they don't...

...When, through constant misuse, fortuitous becomes synonymous with fortunate, imply with infer, comprise with constitute, the language shrinks and distinctions become harder to draw...

...Some of his entries were not merely concise but incomprehensible...

...In politics, in fact, he was a bit of a booby...

...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...

...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...

...This is what the book was about in the first edition, and it's what it is about in the fourth...

...That's what Strunk was about, that's what I am about, and that (I hope) is what the book is about...

...Consider finalize—what moves a man to coin the word, in place of "conclude" or "settle" or "complete...

...I'll get to the good news in a moment...

...The world of Strunk and White is a world of typewriters and pencils, not word processors...