The Elements of Style
First expanded edition (1959) | |
| Author |
|
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Maira Kalman (2005 only) |
| Subject | American English style guide |
| Publisher |
|
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 43 (1918), 52 (1920), 71 (1959), 105 (1999) |
| OCLC | 27652766 |
| 808/.042 21 | |
| LC Class | PE1421 .S7 (Strunk) PE1408 .S772 (Strunk & White) |
The Elements of Style (also Strunk & White) is a writing style guide for American English, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage," ten "elementary principles of composition", "a few matters of form", a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused", and a list of 57 "words often misspelled". The first edition was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920. Thirty-five years later, the writer and editor E. B. White revised and expanded the Strunk & White style guide for publication by Macmillan Publishers in 1959, which was the edition of The Elements of Style that Time magazine recognized in 2011 as one of the hundred best and most influential non-fiction books in English since 1923.
About Strunk & White, the writer Dorothy Parker said that:
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.