'Elements of Style' marks 50th anniversary

"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."

—William Strunk Jr.,

The Elements of Style, 1918

ITHACA, N.Y. — History's famous word collaborators include Gilbert and Sullivan, Lennon and McCartney, Woodward and Bernstein.

But while those pairs were contemporaries, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White worked four decades apart, yet the little known turn-of-the-century Cornell University English professor and his universally famous student produced a classic that has become one of America's most influential and best-known guides on grammar and usage.

"Strunk and White's The Elements of Style" has sold more than 10 million copies since its initial publication in April 1959. Its present-day publisher, Longman Publishers, has put out a special black leather-bound, gold-embossed edition in tribute of the 50th anniversary.

"It's ubiquitous," said Elaine Engst, director of Cornell's division of rare and manuscript collections. "There have always been writing guides. But this is the one that left its mark. Part of that was White's fame, but the book also was inexpensive and accessible and has stayed true to Strunk's original focus on brevity and clarity."

Strunk and White's success is the result of an "emphasis on plain style being preferable to more ornate kind of writing. Simple rather than complex. Native rather than foreign. Active rather than passive. Verbal rather than nominal," said Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of "Declining Grammar and Other Essays on the English Vocabulary" and "Guide to Home Language Repair."

Strunk, a native of Cincinnati, began teaching English at Cornell in 1899 after getting his Ph.D. there in 1896.

"He is remembered as being very concise, which meant his lectures tended to be very short. To fill time, he usually said everything three times," Engst said. Despite his rigorous attitude about writing, students described Strunk as friendly and funny.

In 1918, he self-published a writing guide for his students, which they could buy at the campus bookstore. Its main precept was "omit needless words."

"The little book" was 43 pages. It detailed eight elementary rules of usage, 10 elementary principles of composition and "a few matters of form," and contained a list of commonly misused words and expressions.