This book is a true classic — a resource many writers probably already own.
I was introduced to this book during my first semester of junior college. It was one of our required textbooks for English 1A.
Because of how useful it was, The Elements of Style was one of the few books I didn’t sell back to the college bookstore at the end of the semester.
It’s amazing to me that such a small book (only 85 pages long) has made such an impact on so many writers for so many years!
When Macmillan Publishing asked White to revise the original edition (1957) for the college market, White did so.
In the Introduction, he said: “Even after I got through tampering with it, it was still a tiny thing, a barely tarnished gem. … It concentrates on fundamentals: the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated.”
William Strunk, Jr. had been E.B. White’s English professor at Cornell University in 1919 and had privately printed the first edition himself.
(When I looked for this on Amazon, I realized that a 4th edition was released 20 years after the version I’ve owned for decades. So I ordered the newest edition [published in July 1999] before I finished writing this newsletter. It wasn’t until I read the foreword by essayist Roger Angell [new in this edition] that I realized Mr. Angell was E.B. White’s stepson!)
According to the Greensboro (North Carolina) Daily News, this book “should be the daily companion of anyone who writes for a living and, for that matter, anyone who writes at all.”
