A Sense of Style

"I learned more about writing from White than from anybody else," said Humorist James Thurber once of E. B. (for Elwyn Brooks) White, the lucid essayist whose weekly wit led off The New Yorker for years before he deserted Manhattan to write on a farm in Maine. From Thurber it was high praise, and it spoke another truth: behind every writer stands a teacher of some kind. Behind E. B. White himself, it turns out, stands the exhortative ghost of a curious and delightful man, the late Professor William Strunk Jr., proprietor of English 8 at Cornell University when White passed through 40 years ago.

Brief & Bold. Will Strunk wrote a book ("The little book," he liked to say) called The Elements of Style--43 privately printed pages that constituted his magnificent attempt to prune the jungle of English rhetoric and replant it on the head of a pin. Until White recently got hold of one of the Cornell library's two surviving copies, he had not laid eyes on the book in 38 years. Now, thanks to White, the supply has been replenished (Macmillan; $2.50) with a fond testimonial by White: "From every page there peers out at me the puckish face of my professor, his short hair . . . combed down over his forehead, his eyes blinking incessantly behind steel-rimmed spectacles as though he had just emerged into strong light, his lips nibbling each other like nervous horses."

"Strunk loved the clear, the brief, the bold.'' White writes, "and his book is clear, brief, bold." It consists mainly of eight rules of usage, ten principles of composition, a few matters of form. Each Strunk command (Do not break sentences in two. Use the active voice. Omit needless words) is followed by a short, barking essay and examples in parallel columns--right v. wrong, timid v. bold, ragged v. trim. Strunk had pet usages; he insisted on forming the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's regardless of the final consonant (Rule 1 ). It would have enraged him to read a modern newspaper headline about Bonnie Prince Charlie: CHARLES' TONSILS OUT.

Revise & Rewrite. The great Strunkian theme: "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subject in outline, but that every word tell."

At 60, ex-Student White (One Man's Meat, The Second Tree from the Corner) is more than qualified to add his own exhortations to the professor's lecture. Some of White's Strunkian reminders: Do not overwrite. Do not overstate. Do not explain too much. Avoid fancy words. Revise and rewrite. Perhaps above all, shun the modern euphoria of Old Spontaneous Me ("Stay out of the act"). To White, style cannot be separated from sense: "The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one . . . Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; it is nondetachable . . . The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity."

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