Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style

The timeless and the obsolete

28 January, 2026

Recently I joined a technical writers’ Discord. They recommened to read again Strunk and White’s "The Elements of Style." I looked around my house for my old copy and read it.

If you went to university in the United States in the 90s, chances are that at some point an English professor assigned you this book. I don’t know how popular it is outside the United States. It is a short guide on how to write well, along with some English usage guidelines. William Strunk originally wrote it sometime during the first decade of the 1900s. E.B White updated the book in the 1950s. The book’s advice is about 70 and 120 years old. As one would expect, some of the advice is outdate, yet a lot is still useful.

"The Elements of Style" wants us to be clear writers. To achieve this we must be as economical as possible, since short sentences are easier to understand than longer sentences, and we should avoid suprising our readers because surprises disorient them. Each of the five chapters dive into how to achieve this by following their rules.

Chapter 2, "Elementary Principles of Composition," has the most useful advice for modern writers. It gives a list of principles on how you should organize your writing. Without explicitly saying it, it encourages one to write in a simple, direct manner creating the least amount of surprises for the reader. Instead of giving a summary, I encourage you to read the chapter. It is short. It is a good list to reread.

"And Approach to Style" is my second favorite chapter from the book. It gives writing advice that doesn’t really fit anywhere else in the book. It is hard to disagree with some of the advice, such as "be clear" or "don’t use dialect unless your ear is good." It is harder to agree with some other advice such as "do not inject opinion", "do not overwrite", or "do not overstate." To these I want to object with "it depends." And I like this chapter for this reason, because even when one doesn’t fully agree with the rule, we must express why we don’t agree with it, which is a productive exercise.

Chapter 1 and chapter 3 has a list of what must be the most common mistakes that college students, and many adults, including myself, do. They are more technical, like the use of tenses, commas, and parentheses. These are the ones that one drills with practice. These chapters should be useful to people learning English from a different language and for people interested in learning U.S. writing conventions.

"Words and Expressions Commonly Misussed" is the most obsolete chapter from my 1979 third edition copy. It has a list of expressions that the authors find incorrect or distatesful. It read now like a museum to pendantry. Although there are some entries that are still valid, such as avoiding the word "very" and "nice", we have some cranky gems like their dislike fo the word "facility" to describe a building. They also dislike that we "contact" people; we should get in touch or meet with them. They expressed their hatred for the word "fix" and "prestigious." It is an amusing chapter. The English language marches on despite the heoric efforts of language warriors such as Strunk and White.

It is a great handbook. Its greatest weakness is that it is a handbook, written by a university professor as a supplement for his classes. It will have missing topics, and the lack of a rule or an article discussing audiences is sorely missed. Closely connected with adapting our writing to audiences are discussions about how to adapt rules according to the genre that we are writing. Over explanation may be necessary in expository writing, yet bad style in fiction.

"Elements" reminds me of mathematical textbooks that were spawn from lecture notes in that the text is carefully crafted summary of a longer, nuanced lecture. We don’t know what Strunk told the students about writing for different audiences. I imagine that if a student had doubts on one of his rules, he would have explained that this particular one applied to writing fiction. Since Strunk has been dead for decades, we get the book without these topics, to the detriment of the book, but mostly to the readers, since it would have been great to know what Strunk thought about audiences.

It is a brief book, a quick read if one has never read it, a quicker read if we read it before. It is like running into an old college classmate. Prepare some tea, and have a nice evening re-reading this classic.