The Elements of Style

William Strunk Jr. · 1918 · Read the original (Project Gutenberg, public domain)

Forty-three pages. That's it. Strunk wrote the shortest useful specification for English prose. Rule 17: "Omit needless words." He practiced what he preached—the rule is three words. The book is a checklist: it tells you what's wrong, not what to write. Apply it, and your prose clears up. Ignore it, and nobody will tell you why they stopped reading.

The argument

William Strunk Jr. was a Cornell English professor who got tired of repeating himself. In 1918 he self-published a forty-three-page pamphlet for his students: seven rules of usage, eleven principles of composition, a few matters of form. No theory of rhetoric. No appeals to taste. Just rules, stated as absolutes.

The rules are prescriptive and unconditional. Use the active voice. Put statements in positive form. Use definite, specific, concrete language. Omit needless words. No hedging, no "it depends," no "consider whether." This is the book's strength and its weakness. The rules are memorable because they admit no exceptions. You can carry them in your head while you write, which is more than you can say for most style guides.

They are also wrong in edge cases. Passive voice is sometimes correct. "The president was assassinated" puts the object where it belongs. Google's style guide would eventually enumerate the three exceptions Strunk never wrote down. But Strunk was not writing for edge cases. He was writing for undergraduates who padded their essays with throat-clearing and buried their verbs in nominalizations. For that audience, unconditional rules are the right tool.

The rules

Rule	The instruction	What it catches
Omit needless words	Cut every word that doesn't earn its place	Padding, throat-clearing, redundancy
Use the active voice	Subject does the action	Bureaucratic evasion, weak attribution
Put statements in positive form	Say what is, not what isn't	Double negatives, hedging
Use parallel construction	Match form to matched content	Inconsistent lists, asymmetric comparisons
Use definite, specific, concrete language	Prefer the particular to the abstract	Vagueness, hand-waving, empty generalities
Keep related words together	Don't separate subject from verb, verb from object	Ambiguous modification, garden-path sentences

Discussion

Strunk works because the rules are binary: pass or fail. You can apply them mechanically, which is why they survive a century later. But binary rules have no exceptions clause. "Use the active voice" fails when the object matters more than the subject. "The president was assassinated" is passive, and it is correct. The passive puts the president in topic position, which is where the reader's attention belongs. Strunk's rule cannot express this distinction.

Every successor had to add an exceptions clause. Orwell added Rule 6. Williams derived the conditions. Google enumerated the cases. But the rules themselves have outlasted every configuration written for them.

The reason is format. Most style guides are reference material: you look something up when you need it. Strunk is short enough to memorize. A rule you carry in your head while writing is worth more than a rule you have to look up afterward. "Omit needless words" fires in real time, mid-sentence, because it fits in working memory. That is the advantage of forty-three pages. The false positives are the price of compression, and for a pamphlet you can read in an hour, the price is low. This is also why Strunk's rules translate well into automated slop detection: binary rules are computable in a way that taste-based judgments are not.

The Elements of Style

The argument

The rules

Discussion

See also