Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

  Like Murray, Strunk slanted his material toward his targeted readers. His purpose was not to give comprehensive or sophisticated style advice. As he makes clear in the book’s introduction, his aim was more limited. He describes the book as “intended for use in English courses in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature.” He warns his students, “The book covers only a small portion of the field of English style.” He recommends several more substantial guides that they should also consult.

  Strunk doesn’t expect his classes to learn how to write well by studying a forty-three-page booklet. “Once past the essentials,” he explains, “students profit most by individual instruction based on the problems of their own work.” Furthermore, he does not advocate blind adherence even to these basic rules. “The best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric,” he admits. He then adds with characteristic bluntness, “When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit.… Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules.” He advises students to learn how to write “plain English adequate for everyday uses” before they attempt to develop an original style.37

  Strunk organized the book for maximum ease of use. Besides the brief introductory comments, it consists of four sections, each with a numbered list of rules and accompanying comments. The table of contents lists every rule, so users can quickly find help for a particular problem. The first section after the introduction lists eight “Elementary Rules of Usage.” Most of these deal with punctuation—“Form the possessive singular of nouns with ’s”; “Do not join independent clauses by a comma.” The rules are succinct and unadorned. As White put it, “for sheer pith … it probably sets a record that is not likely to be broken.”38

  Strunk realized that applying his pithy rules could be tricky, so he fleshed them out with explanatory remarks and examples. For instance, after stating the rule “Form the possessive singular of nouns with ’s” he gives a list of exceptions—Moses’ laws, for righteousness’ sake. Often, rules that sound too sweeping on their own are put in context in the explanatory paragraph. Expanding on the rule “Use the active voice,” Strunk says. “This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.”39

  A section on composition follows the usage section. This part of the book offers guidelines for structuring a piece of writing. Here, too, the advice is basic and straightforward—“As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic sentence.” Several of the rules—there are eighteen in all—are reminiscent of Murray’s “Perspicuity” section, where he proposed guidelines for good writing. Murray’s three requirements for strong writing were “purity, propriety, precision.” Strunk’s principles are similar. “Put statements in positive form,” he enjoins his students, don’t use slangy terms like lose out and kind of, and of course, “omit needless words.” Murray advised his readers to avoid ending sentences with “any inconsiderable word.” Strunk tells students to “place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.” Although Strunk doesn’t say so, it’s safe to assume that he would have felt as reluctant as Murray to end a sentence with a preposition.40

  The book continues with a section on form—mainly covering the accepted format for quotations and references—and ends with checklists of misused and misspelled words. Strunk describes the items on the misused list as “not so much bad English” as “careless writing.” Some are standard entries in “frequently confused” lists—affect/effect, fewer/less—or standard usage critics’ peeves, such as using due to to mean because of instead of attributable to. Others seem to be more personal dislikes. Strunk labels factor “a hackneyed word” and calls student body a “needless and awkward” phrase better expressed by the simple students.

  Although Strunk mentions one or two usage issues—he tells students not to use they with everybody, for example—The Elements of Style is almost devoid of actual grammar advice. Rather, it reflects Strunk’s preoccupations as a teacher. It addresses basic composition errors, such as poor organization, wordiness, and confusion about how to use quotations. Strunk would no doubt have been surprised if anyone had told him that his little book of writing hints would one day metamorphose into the new sticklers’ Bible.

  * * *

  Strunk retired from teaching in 1937 and The Elements of Style disappeared from the Cornell bookstore’s shelves. It might have disappeared entirely if not for White. White’s college years were mostly taken up with editing the well-regarded Cornell Daily Sun. As he later admitted, he was only loosely engaged with his classwork. His English 8 class, however, was an exception. Long after leaving Cornell, he would write to Strunk’s brother recalling the class as one of a handful of educational experiences that had stayed with him. “The ideal of precision, of brevity, of clarity,” he wrote, “it can hardly be called an education but it has been such a help.”41

  Even so, White’s memory of Strunk’s book was hazy when he encountered it again. By the time it arrived in his mailbox in March 1957, White had been a New Yorker staff writer for three decades and was famous as the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. The book was a gift from former classmate Howard Stevenson. Stevenson, now the editor of the Cornell Alumni News, had discovered two copies of Elements in Cornell’s library and somehow beguiled the librarians into parting with one so he could send it to White. It’s rare for libraries to surrender their books. Cornell’s librarians might have agreed to it because White was a celebrated alumnus or because the self-published book didn’t seem especially valuable.

  Writing about the book in The New Yorker, White confesses that he had nearly forgotten about it, although he must once have owned a copy. He was delighted to rediscover its virtues. White admired the book’s succinctness and heartily approved of its forceful tone. He describes it as “a forty-three page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.” It is, he says, Strunk’s attempt to “cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin.”

  He imagines “Sergeant Strunk” snapping orders to his platoon of student writers—“Do not join independent clauses with a comma”; “In summaries, keep to one tense.” Most of all, “Omit needless words.” White confides, “I have been trying to omit needless words since 1919 and although there are still many words that cry for omission, and the huge task will never be accomplished, it is exciting to me to reread the masterly Strunkian elaboration of this noble theme.”42

  Besides outlining the content of the book for New Yorker readers, White paints a charming picture of his former teacher, who had died eleven years earlier. He writes nostalgically, “From every line there peers out at me the puckish face of my professor, his short hair parted neatly in the middle and combed down over his forehead, his eyes blinking incessantly behind steel rimmed spectacles,… his smile shuttling to and fro.” White assumes that Cornell’s English classes now rely on much longer, fancier textbooks than The Elements of Style—“books with upswept tail fins and automatic verbs.” Still, if faced with college students in need of writing advice, he says, “I would simply lean far out over the desk, clutch my lapels, blink my eyes, and say, ‘Get the little book! Get the little book! Get the little book!’”43

  White’s brief essay sparked an immediate response. The same week that it appeared in The New Yorker, Jack Case, an editor at Macmillan Company, wrote to White expressing interest in an updated version of The Elements of Style. No one at the publishing house had yet seen the original, but Case and others there believed that an unadulterated shot of plain grammar advice was just what midcentury Americans craved. It would be an antidote to the unsettling linguistics-based theories of language use then making the rounds of college English departments.

  White agreed to edit and enlarge the book, and his new edition appeared in the spring of 1959. Although much l
onger than the original, it still amounted to only seventy-one pages. Nearly all of Strunk’s content remained unchanged. In White’s words, he “added a bit, subtracted a bit, rearranged it in a few places, and in general … made small alterations.”44 The section on misused words almost doubled. White added several common usage critics’ peeves—hopefully used as a sentence modifier, different than used for different from, unique used with modifiers like very. White also deleted the section on misspelled words and replaced some of Strunk’s literary examples with excerpts from modern authors such as Faulkner and Hemingway.

  The biggest change from the 1918 book is an added final section, “An Approach to Style.” With this section, White released the book from its English 8 straitjacket and expanded it into an exploration of the writing process itself. Part inspirational essay and part practical checklist, it guides writers through the tangled thickets of composition. White explains that it’s intended to provide “gentle reminders” of “what most of us know and, at times, forget.”

  He cautions that there is “no infallible guide to good writing.” How to achieve style in its larger sense of the writer’s distinctive voice is something of a mystery, and this final chapter is “a mystery story, thinly disguised.” However, to keep the tone of the book consistent, White has decided to present his reminders in the form of twenty-one numbered rules, each followed by a clarifying paragraph.45

  When formulating his rules, White adopts Strunk’s tone of clipped command. Some rules are broad enough to encompass a whole writing philosophy—“Write in a way that comes naturally,” while others address a specific issue—“Use orthodox spelling”—but all are short and curtly stated. White ends his style section by repeating his old professor’s central dictum. Beginning writers, he says, “should err on the side of conservatism.” Although he assures his readers that English is “a living stream,” where “no idiom is taboo, no accent forbidden,” he thinks it’s best to be “armed with the rules of grammar” before venturing into new creative territory.46

  Although Elements is often described as a grammar book, White’s revision, like Strunk’s original, contained very little grammar advice. What does exist, however, is relentlessly conservative. For instance, although White admits that “there is a precedent from the fourteenth century downward for interposing an adverb between to and the infinitive,” he advises, “the construction is for the most part avoided by careful writers.” He also upholds Strunk’s position that he (not he or she) should be paired with words like everyone, unless the referent “is or must be feminine.” They is never correct.47

  Some of White’s comments in the text suggest a more flexible attitude. “Style rules of this sort are, of course, somewhat a matter of individual preference,” he acknowledges in his introduction, “and even the established rules of grammar are open to challenge.” He prefaces the list of suggested usage guides that begins the misused words section with a remark that almost seems to echo Whitney or Lounsbury. “The shape of our language is not rigid,” he says. “In questions of usage we have no lawgiver whose word is final.”48

  This theoretical openness didn’t translate into a broad-mindedness about specifics. In practice, White was firmly in the purists’ camp. Both he and his editor, Jack Case, were contemptuous of academic linguists, or as White called them, “the Happiness Boys,” who to their minds encouraged an “anything goes” attitude toward language use. Case nonetheless understood that the book would be vulnerable to criticism if outdated rules, such as the distinction between shall and will, were allowed to stand the way Strunk had written them. He suggested in a letter that White might soften his stance by inserting the words “in formal writing” or some similar formula here and there. White answered implacably, “I don’t know whether Macmillan is running scared or not,… but I know that I cannot, and will-shall not, attempt to adjust the unadjustable Mr. Strunk to the modern liberal of the English Department.”49

  White and Strunk both understood that language and usage evolve—as a graduate student, Strunk had studied philology as well as literature—but they believed in the traditional rules. Later in his response to Case, White explains, “No ball game [is] anything but chaotic if it lacks a mound, a box, bases, and foul lines. That’s what Strunk was about, that’s what I am about, and that (I hope) is what the book is about.”50 Strunk and White’s foul lines were drawn very close to the ones that Lowth and Murray had laid down. They only swerved to incorporate a few later contributions from the verbal critics, such as the ban on split infinitives. If White’s readers wanted to experiment with usage and grammar, they were free to do so. However, they would do it without permission from Elements. Strunk and White’s principles would remain unapologetically conventional. As with earlier guidelines, they would harden over time into articles of faith.

  Case’s worries about the book’s reception turned out to be unfounded. As a reference book of under one hundred pages, Elements didn’t draw major reviews, but several magazines and newspapers printed positive notices. A reviewer for The Rotarian says, “This small book is immensely practical and thoroughly enjoyable. I recommend it strongly.” The Analysts Journal assures its subscribers that business writers will “find The Elements of Style not only interesting but editorially profitable.”51

  New York Times writer Charles Poore devoted a “Books of the Times” column to Elements. E. B. White, he says, has been rummaging in our linguistic attic and “brought out a splendid trophy for all who are interested in reading and writing.” Not that Poore agrees with all of White’s rules. White’s insistence on adding possessive ’s to names ending in s—Charles’s tonsils, for example—seems unnecessarily cumbersome. Nonetheless, he thinks readers can learn much from the book. “Buy it, study it, enjoy it,” he says, “it’s as timeless as a book can be in our age of volubility.”52

  White’s own magazine, The New Yorker, only gave the book a brief unsigned notice, but described it in glowing terms. “Distinguished by brevity, clarity, and prickly good sense, it is, unlike most such manuals, a book as well as a tool,” praises the reviewer. The notice rounds off with a warm commendation—“his old teacher would have been proud of him.”53

  Elements may have won only superficial notice from reviewers, but book buyers clamored for it. In May 1959 it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. By fall the book had reached the top of several bestseller lists and seemed in no danger of falling off anytime soon. A year after its first appearance, it had sold a dizzying 200,000 copies.54 Elements was more like a bestselling grammar book of early America than a typical twentieth-century usage guide. These were usually steady sellers, but few if any vaulted to literary fame.

  White did occasionally receive letters from readers who had noticed that the book sometimes failed to follow its own rules. For example, it includes many passive sentences even though one of the principles of composition is “Use the active voice.” White answered these letters good-humoredly, pointing out that Strunk often modified his advice by saying “as a rule” or something similar. Strunk did, after all, point out in his explanatory paragraph that passive was often desirable or necessary. Answering a letter from a reader who complains that White uses parvum opus (“small work”) although the book tells writers to avoid foreign languages, he replies, “Latin … isn’t a foreign language, it’s a dead language. To me, it’s very much alive—at the root of many of our words.”55

  Much more often than not, the letters were laudatory. One woman wrote to tell White that his writing reassured her that the world is a rational place. Another wrote to let him know that she was omitting needless words. “Thanks,” he responded. “So am I.”56

  Some of the popularity of Elements is no doubt attributable to White’s status as a well-known author. The book itself, though, clearly had great appeal. A pocket-sized style guide consisting mainly of brief, numbered commands is much easier to read and consult than a detailed guide the size of a dictionary. People were no doubt attracted to Elements for
the same reasons that colonial Americans liked the grammars of Lowth and Dilworth—it was short, straightforward, and seemed to guarantee that following the rules would result in elegant English.

  Elements would go on to sell millions of copies through four more editions. It would become required reading for beginning writers and publishing professionals alike. Writing teachers would recommend it to their students. Editors would keep copies on their desks. The rules themselves would be memorized and quoted, while the mitigating comments were forgotten or ignored. Strunk and White would soon become shorthand for no-fail usage advice, just as Murray had once been another word for grammar.

  The century had begun with an unprecedented embrace of slang and colloquialisms and an apparent loosening of grammatical standards, but nearly sixty years later the old grammar rules still retained a tight cultural grip. In spite of the Happiness Boys, large numbers of midcentury Americans felt the need for an old-fashioned usage guide. There wasn’t much grammar in The Elements of Style, but what was included was strict enough to gladden the hearts of purists.

  8.

  The Persistence of Grammar

  In 1961, 133 years after the appearance of An American Dictionary of the English Language, the name of Webster was once again embroiled in controversy. It began in early September when the G. & C. Merriam Company issued a press release announcing the imminent appearance of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. It would be the first complete overhaul of the company’s venerable unabridged dictionary since the publication of Webster’s Second in 1934.

  The first hint that the new dictionary would break with tradition came with the press release issued a few weeks before publication. It promised no fewer than 100,000 new words and updated meanings, from A-bomb to Zen, but the changes would not be limited to new words. People who upgraded to Webster’s Third could expect several “revolutionary” new features, among them a new pronunciation key and a new way of structuring definitions.