Some books are so indispensable that you own them, even in the Internet age. Some books are so valuable that if one is misplaced you’ll replace it. This must have happened with The Elements of Style, which my generation called “the Strunk and White” for E.B. White, who in 1957 “tampered” slightly with the self-published textbook of his Cornell professor in 1919, William Strunk Jr.
In a long-delayed sorting of the shelves in our manse, Shady Hill, I found two paperback copies, meaning frantic I bought another — in September 2004, evidently, as the Barnes & Noble receipt was among the pages. (Call it pack-rat, call it obsession-compulsion, it sure comes in handy.) The sorting is really a culling but I’ll keep both. Here is why.
The older, the Second Edition, 1972, cost $1.65 and was 91 pages, including White’s six-page introduction. At the end is his 19-page chapter on writing, “An Approach to Style,” long beloved by practiced scribes. The introduction explains that Strunk’s students called it “the little book.”
Consumer Reports has noted in its car write-ups that essentially every automaker enlarges its small lines in succeeding seasons. You buy a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla in their early years as high-mileage subcompact hatchbacks. When it’s time for a new car, why look how they’ve improved. Your needs have changed so they’re compacts. Later they’re small sedans, rather like Accords and Camrys had been, which now are mid-sized sedans.
The 1999 Elements of Style, ($7.95) is the fourth edition. Fair enough. It includes White’s introduction and writing chapter but also a concise two-page foreword by his stepson, the writer Roger Angell, where he notes he’s made a few updates. The publisher has also included a one-page afterword, by Charles Osgood, perhaps to appeal to the college student of today.
Let’s pause for Osgood to be “Googled” to see who he is. Hint: broadcast wordsmith.
Angell does not mention the book now has an index, which is always helpful. The overall 133 pages calculates out into a 32 percent increase for “the little book.” Before the index is a seven-page glossary, credited to Robert DiYanni. It defines terms such as adjective, clause, contraction, noun, possessive, subject and verb.
How could they make it any better? They can draw you pictures. In 2005 an illustrated version was published. It’s 176 pages. The paperback edition will cost $14 on its release this August.
Now before we get all bothered about The Elements of Style becoming increasingly, or is it decreasingly, elemental, note that a lot of schools in the 1970s used the Oregon Curriculum for secondary school English classes. This was developed from the transformational grammar (thanks, Wikipedia) theories of linguist Noam Chomsky.
Its grammar and sentence-diagramming terms were unique, and we in the Fort Smith public schools did not learn or apply words like adverb or predicate. This means in my work as an editor, I cannot use the common language in explaining changes to copy. But when a college-level book has to define noun and verb, and paint a picture, what advantage is to be had? -30-
