The Element of Style
Foreword*
THE FIRST writer I watched at work was my stepfather, E. B. White. Each
Tuesday morning, he would close his study door and sit down to write the
"Notes and Comment" page for The New Yorker. The task was familiar to him —
he was required to file a few hundred words of editorial or personal
commentary on some topic in or out of the news that week — but the sounds of
his typewriter from his room came in hesitant bursts, with long silences in
between. Hours went by. Summoned at last for lunch, he was silent and
preoccupied, and soon excused himself to get back to the job. When the copy
went off at last, in the afternoon RFD pouch — we were in Maine, a day's editorial英文
mail away from New York — he rarely seemed satisfied. "It isn't good
enough," he said sometimes. "I wish it were better."
Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time. Less frequent
practitioners — the job applicant; the business executive with an annual
report to get out; the high school senior with a Faulkner assignment; the
graduate-school student with her thesis proposal; the writer of a letter of
condolence — often get stuck in an awkward passage or find a muddle on their
screens, and then blame themselves. What should be easy and flowing looks
tangled or feeble or overblown — not what was meant at all. What's wrong
with me, each one thinks. Why can't I get this right?
It was this recurring question, put to himself, that must have inspired White
to revive and add to a textbook by an English professor of his, Will Strunk
Jr., that he had first read in college, and to get it published. The result,
this quiet book, has been in print for forty years, and has offered more than
ten million writers a helping hand. White knew that a compendium of specific
tips — about singular and plural verbs, parentheses, the "that" — "which"
scuffle, and many others — could clear up a recalcitrant sentence or
subclause when quickly reconsulted, and that the larger principles needed to
be kept in plain sight, like a wall sampler.
How simple they look, set down here in White's last chapter: "Write in a way
that comes naturally," "Revise and rewrite," "Do not explain too much," and
the rest; above all, the cleansing, clarion "Be clear." How often I have
turned to them, in the book or in my mind, while trying to start or unblock
or revise some piece of my own writing! They help — they really do. They
work. They are the way.
E. B. White's prose is celebrated for its ease and clarity — just think of
Charlotte's Web — but maintaining this standard required endless attention.
When the new issue of The New Yorker turned up in Maine, I sometimes saw him
reading his "Comment" piece over to himself, with only a slightly different
expression than the one he'd worn on the day it went off. Well, O.K., he
seemed to be saying. At least I got the elements right.
This edition has been modestly updated, with word processors and air
conditioners making their first appearance among White's references, and with
a light redistribution of genders to permit a feminine pronoun or female
farmer to take their places among the males who once innocently served him.
Sylvia Plath has knocked Keats out of the box, and I notice that "America"
has become "this country" in a sample text, to forestall a subsequent and
possibly demeaning "she" in the same paragraph. What is not here is anything
about E-mail — the rules-free, lower-case flow that cheerfully keeps us in
touch these days. E-mail is conversation, and it may be replacing the sweet
and endless talking we once sustained (and tucked away) within the informal
letter. But we are all writers and readers as well as communicators, with the
need at times to please and satisfy ourselves (as White put it) with the
clear and almost perfect thought.
Roger Angell
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Introduction*
AT THE close of the first World War, when I was a student at Cornell, I took
a course called English 8. My professor was William Strunk Jr. A textbook

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