“The Elements of Style” Never Loses Luster for Lovers of Language

While our digital age has ushered in not a few changes with respect to the written word and how we communicate, there is a 100+-year-old book that still has something to offer our sophisticated new world.

The Elements of Style, written by William Strunk Jr. and later updated by E.B White, is a valuable reference tool – still on many writers’ desks, or digitally as an app on smart phones.

Strunk was a 20^th Century Cornell University professor; E.B. White, a contributor to The New Yorker magazine and author of the children’s book, Charlotte’s Web.

The guide is just 85 pages in length.  But therein lies its beauty, simplicity and clarity. 

“Vigorous writing is concise,” Strunk writes.  “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 subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

Other reminders for PR pros in the business of storytelling:

• Use the active voice
• Write with nouns and verbs
• Do not overwrite
• Do not overstate
• Make sure the reader knows who is speaking
• Be clear
• Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity

Besides elementary rules of usage and principles of English composition, White included a section entitled, “An Approach to Style.”

“In the days when I was sitting in [Strunk’s] class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having shortchanged himself – a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock,” White writes.

This is a keen reminder that while an unlimited resource, words should be used with care and as if there are only so many to go around.