THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

Over 50 years ago I was teaching composition classes to high school students at Borromeo High School Seminary in Cleveland, Ohio. I remember assigning my classes the task of writing an essay a week which I would correct and return to the students the next day. After they made the corrections I would assign a grade.

It was sheer drudgery for many, but it was often sheer drudgery for me as well because I usually had three or four composition sections with 20 to 25 students in each section.

As I recall, I required each student to buy a copy of an inexpensive paperback called the Elements of Style by Strunk and White. Here is what Wikipedia, a free multilingual Web-based encyclopedia says about this paperback book which is still in circulation:

The book was originally written in 1918 and privately published by Cornell University professor William Strunk, Jr., and was first revised with the help of Edward A. Tenney in 1935. In 1957, it came to the attention of E. B. White at The New Yorker. White had studied under Strunk in 1919 but had since forgotten the "little book" which he called a ”forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.” A few weeks later, White wrote a piece for The New Yorker lauding Professor Strunk and his devotion to "lucid" English prose. The book's author died in 1946, and Macmillan and Company commissioned White to recast a new edition of The Elements of Style, published in 1959. In this revision, White independently expanded and modernized the 1918 work, creating the handbook now known to millions of writers and students as, simply, "Strunk and White." White's first edition sold some two million copies, with total sales of three editions (over a span of four decades) surpassing ten million copies.

Not everyone is high in praise for the Elements of Style. But I still have a copy on my bookshelf and remember it fondly in this 50th anniversary year of its publication.

I like what someone wrote about the The Elements of Style: “It won't change your life. It will change your writing.”

It certainly has changed my writing and at least the writing of one of my former students—Joe Sitko—who wrote to me a couple of weeks ago about those writing classes at Borromeo fifty years ago. His remarks are quoted in this edition’s REFLECTION.

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