The Elements of Style

by E. B. White

  18. Use figures of speech sparingly.

  The simile is a common device and a useful one, but similes coming in rapid fire, one right on top of another, are more distracting than illuminating. Readers need time to catch their breath; they can't be expected to compare everything with something else, and no relief in sight.

  When you use metaphor, do not mix it up. That is, don't start by calling something a swordfish and end by calling it an hourglass.

  19. Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity.

  Do not use initials for the names of organizations or movements unless you are certain the initials will be readily understood. Write things out. Not everyone knows that MADD means Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and even if everyone did, there are babies being born every minute who will someday encounter the name for the first time. They deserve to see the words, not simply the initials. A good rule is to start your article by writing out names in full, and then, later, when your readers have got their bearings, to shorten them.

  Many shortcuts are self-defeating; they waste the reader's time instead of conserving it. There are all sorts of rhetorical stratagems and devices that attract writers who hope to be pithy, but most of them are simply bothersome. The longest way round is usually the shortest way home, and the one truly reliable shortcut in writing is to choose words that are strong and surefooted to carry readers on their way.

  20. Avoid foreign languages.

  The writer will occasionally find it convenient or necessary to borrow from other languages. Some writers, however, from sheer exuberance or a desire to show off, sprinkle their work liberally with foreign expressions, with no regard for the readers comfort. It is a bad habit. Write in English.

  21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat.

  Young writers will be drawn at every turn toward eccentricities in language. They will hear the beat of new vocabularies, the exciting rhythms of special segments of their society, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem for beginners is to listen to them, learn the words, feel the vibrations, and not be carried away.

  Youths invariably speak to other youths in a tongue of their own devising: they renovate the language with a wild vigor, as they would a basement apartment. By the time this paragraph sees print, psyched, nerd, ripoff, dude, geek, and funky will be the words of yesteryear, and we will be fielding more recent ones that have come bouncing into our speech—some of them into our dictionary as well. A new word is always up for survival. Many do survive. Others grow stale and disappear. Most are, at least in their infancy, more appropriate to conversation than to composition.

  Today, the language of advertising enjoys an enormous circulation. With its deliberate infractions of grammatical rules and its crossbreeding of the parts of speech, it profoundly influences the tongues and pens of children and adults. Your new kitchen range is so revolutionary it obsoletes all other ranges. Your counter top is beautiful because it is accessorized with gold-plated faucets. Your cigarette tastes good like a cigarette should. And, like the man says, you will want to try one. You will also, in all probability, want to try writing that way, using that language. You do so at your peril, for it is the language of mutilation.

  Advertisers are quite understandably interested in what they call "attention getting." The man photographed must have lost an eye or grown a pink beard, or he must have three arms or be sitting wrong-end-to on a horse. This technique is proper in its place, which is the world of selling, but the young writer had best not adopt the device of mutilation in ordinary composition, whose purpose is to engage, not paralyze, the readers senses. Buy the gold-plated faucets it you will, but do not accessorize your prose. To use the language well, do not begin by hacking it to bits; accept the whole body of it, cherish its classic form, its variety, and its richness.

  Another segment of society that has constructed a language of its own is business. People in business say that toner cartridges are in short supply, that they have updated the next shipment of these cartridges, and that they will finalize their recommendations at the next meeting of the board. They are speaking a language familiar and dear to them. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; executives walk among toner cartridges, caparisoned like knights. We should tolerate them—every person of spirit wants to ride a white horse. The only question is whether business vocabulary is helpful to ordinary prose. Usually, the same ideas can be expressed less formidably, if one makes the effort. A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning. Not all such words, of course, can be dismissed summarily; indeed, no word in the language can be dismissed offhand by anyone who has a healthy curiosity. Update isn't a bad word; in the right setting it is useful. In the wrong setting, though, it is destructive, and the trouble with adopting coinages too quickly is that they will bedevil one by insinuating themselves where they do not belong. This may sound like rhetorical snobbery, or plain stuffiness; but you will discover, in the course of your work, that the setting of a word is just as restrictive as the setting of a jewel. The general rule here is to prefer the standard. Finalize, for instance, is not standard; it is special, and it is a peculiarly fuzzy and silly word. Does it mean "terminate," or does it mean "put into final form"? One can't be sure, really, what it means, and one gets the impression that the person using it doesn't know, either, and doesn't want to know.

  The special vocabularies of the law, of the military, of government are familiar to most of us. Even the world of criticism has a modest pouch of private words (luminous, taut), whose only virtue is that they are exceptionally nimble and can escape from the garden of meaning over the wall. Of these critical words, Wolcott Gibbs once wrote, "… they are detached from the language and inflated like little balloons." The young writer should learn to spot them—words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning but that soon burst in air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.

  The language is perpetually in flux: it is a living stream, shifting, changing, receiving new strength from a thousand tributaries, losing old forms in the backwaters of time. To suggest that a young writer not swim in the main stream of this turbulence would be foolish indeed, and such is not the intent of these cautionary remarks. The intent is to suggest that in choosing between the formal and the informal, the regular and the offbeat, the general and the special, the orthodox and the heretical, the beginner err on the side of conservatism, on the side of established usage. No idiom is taboo, no accent forbidden; there is simply a better chance of doing well if the writer holds a steady course, enters the stream of English quietly, and does not thrash about.

  "But," you may ask, "what if it comes natural to me to experiment rather than conform? What if I am a pioneer, or even a genius?" Answer: then be one. But do not forget that what may seem like pioneering may be merely evasion, or laziness—the disinclination to submit to discipline. Writing good standard English is no cinch, and before you have managed it you will have encountered enough rough country to satisfy even the most adventurous spirit.

  Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, "Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar." This moral observation would have no place in a rule book were it not that style is the writer, and therefore what you are, rather than what you know, will at last determine your style. If you write, you must believe—in the truth and worth of the scrawl, in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message. No one can write decently who is distrustful of the readers intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.

  Many references have been made in this book to "the reader," who has been much in the news. It is now necessary to warn you that your concern for the reader must be pure: you must sympathize with the reader's plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time) but never seek to know the rea
der's wants. Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living.

  Full of belief, sustained and elevated by the power of purpose, armed with the rules of grammar, you are ready for exposure. At this point, you may well pattern yourself on the fully exposed cow of Robert Louis Stevenson's rhyme. This friendly and commendable animal, you may recall, was "blown by all the winds that pass /And wet with all the showers." And so must you as a young writer be. In our modern idiom, we would say that you must get wet all over. Mr. Stevenson, working in a plainer style, said it with felicity, and suddenly one cow, out of so many, received the gift of immortality. Like the steadfast writer, she is at home in the wind and the rain; and, thanks to one moment of felicity, she will live on and on and on.

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  Afterword

  Will Strunk and E. B. White were unique collaborators. Unlike Gilbert and Sullivan, or Woodward and Bernstein, they worked separately and decades apart.

  We have no way of knowing whether Professor Strunk took particular notice of Elwyn Brooks White, a student of his at Cornell University in 1919. Neither teacher nor pupil could have realized that their names would be linked as they now are. Nor could they have imagined that thirty-eight years after they met, White would take this little gem of a textbook that Strunk had written for his students, polish it, expand it, and transform it into a classic.

  E. B. White shared Strunk's sympathy for the reader. To Strunk's do's and don'ts he added passages about the power of words and the clear expression of thoughts and feelings. To the nuts and bolts of grammar he added a rhetorical dimension.

  The editors of this edition have followed in White's footsteps, once again providing fresh examples and modernizing usage where appropriate. The Elements of Style is still a little book, small enough and important enough to carry in your pocket, as I carry mine. It has helped me to write better. I believe it can do the same for you.

  Charles Osgood

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  Glossary

  adjectival modifier A word, phrase, or clause that acts as an adjective in qualifying the meaning of a noun or pronoun, Your country; a turn-of-the-century style; people who are always late.

  adjective A word that modifies, quantifies, or otherwise describes a noun or pronoun. Drizzly November; midnight dreary; only requirement.

  adverb A word that modifies or otherwise qualifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. Gestures gracefully; exceptionally quiet engine.

  adverbial phrase A phrase that functions as an adverb. (See phrase.) Landon laughs with abandon.

  agreement The correspondence of a verb with its subject in person and number (Karen goes to Cal Tech; her sisters go to UCLA), and of a pronoun with its antecedent in person, number, and gender (As soon as Karen finished the exam, she picked up her books and left the room).

  antecedent The noun to which a pronoun refers. A pronoun and its antecedent must agree in person, number, and gender. Michael and his teammates moved off campus.

  appositive A noun or noun phrase that renames or adds identifying information to a noun it immediately follows. His brother, an accountant with Arthur Andersen, was recently promoted.

  articles The words a, an, and the, which signal or introduce nouns. The definite article the refers to a particular item: the report. The indefinite articles a and an refer to a general item or one not already mentioned: an apple.

  auxiliary verb A verb that combines with the main verb to show differences in tense, person, and voice. The most common auxiliaries are forms of be, do, and have. I am going; we did not go; they have gone. (See also modal auxiliaries. )

  case The form of a noun or pronoun that reflects its grammatical function in a sentence as subject (they), object (them), or possessor (their). She gave her employees a raise that pleased them greatly.

  clause A group of related words that contains a subject and predicate. Moths swarm around a burning candle. While she was taking the test, Karen muttered to herself.

  colloquialism A word or expression appropriate to informal conversation but not usually suitable for academic or business writing. They wanted to get even (instead of they wanted to retaliate).

  complement A word or phrase (especially a noun or adjective) that completes the predicate. Subject complements complete linking verbs and rename or describe the subject: Martha is my neighbor. She seems shy. Object complements complete transitive verbs by describing or renaming the direct object: They found the play exciting. Robert considers Mary a wonderful wife.

  compound sentence Two or more independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction, a correlative conjunction, or a semicolon. Caesar conquered Gaul, but Alexander the Great conquered the world.

  compound subject Two or more simple subjects joined by a coordinating or correlative conjunction. Hemingway and Fitzgerald had little in common.

  conjunction A word that joins words, phrases, clauses, or sentences. The coordinating conjunctions, and, but, or, nor, yet, so, for, join grammatically equivalent elements. Correlative conjunctions ( both, and; either, or; neither, nor) join the same kinds of elements.

  contraction A shortened form of a word or group of words: can't for cannot; they're for they are.

  correlative expression See conjunction.

  dependent clause A group of words that includes a subject and verb but is subordinate to an independent clause in a sentence. Dependent clauses begin with either a subordinating conjunction, such as if, because, since, or a relative pronoun, such as who, which, that. When it gets dark, we'll find a restaurant that has music.

  direct object A noun or pronoun that receives the action of a transitive verb. Pearson publishes books.

  gerund The -ing form of a verb that functions as a noun: Hiking is good exercise. She was praised for her playing.

  indefinite pronoun A pronoun that refers to an unspecified person (anybody) or thing (something).

  independent clause A group of words with a subject and verb that can stand alone as a sentence. Raccoons steal food.

  indirect object A noun or pronoun that indicates to whom or for whom, to what or for what the action of a transitive verb is performed. I asked her a question. Ed gave the door a kick.

  infinitive/split infinitive In the present tense, a verb phrase consisting of to followed by the base form of the verb (to write). A split infinitive occurs when one or more words separate to and the verb (to boldly go).

  intransitive verb A verb that does not take a direct object. His nerve failed.

  linking verb A verb that joins the subject of a sentence to its complement. Professor Chapman is a philosophy teacher. They were ecstatic.

  loose sentence A sentence that begins with the main idea and then attaches modifiers, qualifiers, and additional details: He was determined to succeed, with or without the promotion he was hoping for and in spite of the difficulties he was confronting at every turn.

  main clause An independent clause, which can stand alone as a grammatically complete sentence. Grammarians quibble.

  modal auxiliaries Any of the verbs that combine with the main verb to express necessity (must), obligation (should), permission (may), probability (might), possibility (could), ability (can), or tentativeness (would). Mary might wash the car.

  modifier A word or phrase that qualifies, describes, or limits the meaning of a word, phrase, or clause. Frayed ribbon, dancing flowers, worldly wisdom.

  nominative pronoun A pronoun that functions as a subject or a subject complement: I, we, you, he, she, it, they, who.

  nonrestrictive modifier A phrase or clause that does not limit or restrict the essential meaning of the element it modifies. My youngest niece, who lives in Ann Arbor, is a magazine editor.

  noun A word that names a person, place, thing, or idea. Most nouns have a plural form and a possessive form. Carol; the park; the cup
; democracy.

  number A feature of nouns, pronouns, and a few verbs, referring to singular or plural. A subject and its corresponding verb must be consistent in number; a pronoun should agree in number with its antecedent. A solo flute plays; two oboes join in.

  object The noun or pronoun that completes a prepositional phrase or the meaning of a transitive verb. (See also direct object, indirect object, and preposition.) Frost offered his audience a poetic performance they would likely never forget.

  participial phrase A present or past participle with accompanying modifiers, objects, or complements. The buzzards, circling with sinister determination, squawked loudly.

  participle A verbal that functions as an adjective. Present participles end in -ing (brimming); past participles typically end in -d or -ed (injured) or -en (broken) but may appear in other forms (brought, been, gone).

  periodic sentence A sentence that expresses the main idea at the end. With or without their parents' consent, and whether or not they receive the assignment relocation they requested, they are determined to get married.

  phrase A group of related words that functions as a unit but lacks a subject, a verb, or both. Without the resources to continue.

  possessive The case of nouns and pronouns that indicates ownership or possession (Harold's, ours, mine).