Product Description

A LIVELY, WITTY, AND PASSIONATE
CELEBRATION OF THE "LITTLE BOOK"
THAT HAS DONE MORE TO SHAPE WRITING
IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE THAN
ANY OTHER GUIDE IN MODERN TIMES

Since 1959, The Elements of Style has been required reading for aspiring writers, English majors, and anyone with a love of language. Strunk and White's guidelines for good grammar and style have been discussed, debated, and occasionally even debunked...but they cannot be dismissed.

A Strunk and White devotee since high school, writer and editor Mark Garvey has long appreciated Elements for its character, its attitude, and its bracing good sense. The book is not only a helpful guide to creating better prose, it is also a compelling reminder of the virtues of clarity, simplicity, and truth in writing -- and an inspiring celebration of the individual voice. To tell the story of this timeless, beloved, sometimes controversial book, and the men behind it, Garvey digs deep into the Cornell University archives and the personal letters of E. B. White and his professor William Strunk Jr.

Stylized is a lovingly crafted history that explores Elements' staying power and takes us from the hallowed halls of academia to the bustling offices of The New Yorker magazine to the dazzling days of old Hollywood -- and into the hearts and minds of some of the most respected writers working today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13867 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781416590927
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"I had no idea there were so many delightful anecdotes to be told about the birth and life of one of my favorite little books." -- Will Schwalbe, coauthor of Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better

"Whether you love or hate The Elements of Style, Garvey's infectious enthusiasm and riveting glimpse into Strunk's and White's lives make this book irresistible." -- Mignon Fogarty, author of the New York Times bestseller Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

"A gem of a book about a gem of a book.... Stylized is an exquisite homage that Strunk and White would heartily approve." -- Jack Heffron, author of The Writer's Idea Book

"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy." -- Dorothy Parker on The Elements of Style

"This original, thoroughly researched work is recommended for both academics and for nonstudents who love writing."-- Library Journal

"An eminently readable tribute."-- Booklist

"Much more than basic history and undeniably obsessive." -- New York Times Book Review

"Garvey crafts an ebullient but (suitably) efficient tribute to a much loved writing guide." -- Publishers Weekly starred review

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I hate the guts of English grammar.
-- E.B. WHITE

Cards on the table: I love The Elements of Style. I love the idea of it; I love its execution. I love the book's history, and I love its attitude. I love the fact that it makes some people nuts. I love its trim size. I love the trade dress of the 1979 third edition: The authors' last names fill the top half of the honey-mustard cover in a stocky, crimson, sans serif typeface -- as late seventies as Huggy Bear's hat -- with the title itself rendered in thinner, mostly serifed type, black, in the bottom half. And in the bottom right corner, reversed out white inside a black triangle is this come-on: "With Index." Nice.

Over the years, I have collected multiple copies of The Elements of Style, though without much in the way of method or even, really, intent. I am apparently unable to pass up nicely preserved editions in used-book stores; it's the same sort of trouble some people face when confronted with a heretofore unseen edition of Wallace Stevens's Harmonium or a cache of Wodehouse novels -- or, for others, an unopened six-pack of Billy beer. The copy of Elements in my house that has seen the most action is a paperback third edition from my college years. Its yellowed pages are edged with my own marginalia, scribbled in the heat of new revelation, no doubt, but so old and so sloppily written that it's mostly indecipherable now.

My rarest copy is a 1959 first edition, first printing, in great condition, including a perfectly intact dust jacket (thin, elegant black and white serifed type over a background color that a kitchen-appliance manufacturer might call Harvest Gold), that I found on a cold afternoon's romp through Bookmans Used Books in Flagstaff, Arizona. I paid four dollars for it, an edition that I have seen marked as high as two hundred dollars elsewhere in the used-book trade.

My favorite copy, however, is from the fourteenth printing of the 1979 edition. The book is case-bound, with a vinylimpregnated buckram cover, forest green. Its signatures are Smyth-sewn; its dust jacket is flawless, in the ochre-red-black design just described, and protected by a Mylar cover. It is a pristine edition in all respects but one: A previous owner, perhaps fighting sleep in a mid-April English class -- windows open, dogwoods in the school yard blinding white in the afternoon light, fat bees at work among the blooms -- etched his name in red block letters across the top edge of the book's pages: PERKINS.

Perkins! Are we keeping you up? Sit up straight, man, and contemplate the prize you hold in your hand. Few books of this size (thin as a buttermilk pancake, six ounces waterlogged), in fact, few books of any size, have had the impact on American literary culture and thought that The Elements of Style has. Ounce for ounce, it has done more to establish an American ideal of good prose style than any other book or any teacher, living or dead. Its authors, William Strunk Jr. and E. B. (Elwyn Brooks) White, have joined the pantheon of twentieth-century creative duos whose names, over time, have been transformed into brands, if not movements. Think Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Wright brothers, Tracy and Hepburn, Lennon-McCartney. In fact, The Elements of Style is often called "Strunk and White," usually run together in the pronunciation, "strunkenwhite," the authors' names forever fused, as in "Perkins, please revisit strunkenwhite, Rule 12." And, as with most great duos, the names themselves are now powerful enough to conjure by. For generations the book, by its title or its authors' names, has been widely venerated as a sure, succinct guide to the fundamentals of good writing. But there's more to it than that. No simple book of tips about clear writing sells in the kinds of numbers this book sells. There's something else going on.

The Elements of Style as we know it today almost didn't happen. It took a fat slice of chance circumstance, and thirty-eight years, to draw the elements together. William Strunk Jr., a professor of English at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, selfpublished the first edition of the book in 1918. I have held a copy in the Cornell archives; it's a slight thing, only forty-three pages, with a lightly textured card-stock cover. Intended as a quickreference guide for his students, The Elements of Style covered the basics of clear and clean writing -- tips on usage, composition, word choice, spelling -- and it simplified Strunk's task of grading papers and saved him the cost, in both time and tedium, of using valuable class time to reiterate the fundamentals. The book's advice was useful and accurate, it covered only the essentials, and its tone was brisk. Strunk's Elements of Style sold in the campus bookstore for twenty-five cents, and it enjoyed a respectable run at Cornell, going through several editions in Strunk's lifetime. One of the Cornellians plunking down his quarter in 1919 was E. B. White, a student in Strunk's English Usage and Style class. There were plenty of things about college young Elwyn didn't care for, but the future essayist, children's author, and voice of The New Yorker magazine liked this class, and he liked William Strunk. After White's graduation in 1921, he and Strunk remained friends, but White's memory of The Elements of Style eventually faded.

Time passed. Lots of it. E. B. White began his long career at The New Yorker in 1926. The Depression came and went. Collections of White's essays, sketches, and poems were published. World War II rolled through. White wrote and published his first book for children, Stuart Little. William Strunk Jr., after a forty-six-year teaching career and nine years of retirement, passed away. White published the children's classic Charlotte's Web and still more collected essays. Finally, in the spring of 1957, thirty-eight years after he had last laid eyes on the book, and eleven years after Strunk's death, White received a copy of the 1918 edition of The Elements of Style in the mail; it had been sent by an old college friend who thought White would find it amusing. What happened next is well known to Elements fans -- it's recounted in the introduction of every edition -- and it's where the story really begins.

When Paul McCartney met John Lennon, at a Quarry Men gig in Liverpool, his first impulse was to pick up a guitar and play. When White re-met The Elements of Style in 1957, he, too, turned to his art: He took to the typewriter to tell his readers about Elements and about William Strunk. In a "Letter from the East" column published that summer in The New Yorker, E. B. White wrote about the "rich deposits of gold" he had rediscovered in the little book and about its author, whom he recalled as friendly, funny, audacious, and self-confident. "Will knew where he stood," White wrote. "He scorned the vague, the tame, the colorless, the irresolute. He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong." Strunk tickled White, and White admired his old professor's outlook: Say what you mean, and say it clearly.

The "Letter from the East" caught the eye of Jack Case, a New Yorker reader and alert editor working in the college book department of The Macmillan Company. Immediately after reading White's tribute to Strunk, maybe even before finishing it, Case contacted White to say that his company was interested in publishing The Elements of Style and using White's essay as the book's introduction. They struck an agreement, and, over the next year, White performed a thorough overhaul and updating of Strunk's original text; revised his New Yorker essay to work as the book's introduction; wrote a foreword, "A Note on This Book"; and added a new final chapter, "An Approach to Style." The result, a collaborative teacher-student effort that spanned four decades (not to mention the great divide), was Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. First published in 1959, the book vaulted the charts like "Love Me Do" and has hovered in the ether ever since. Before White's death in 1985, two more editions were published, in 1972 and 1979. The current edition, the fourth, was published in 1999.

We've already seen that my tender feelings for The Elements of Style extend even to the physical book itself. I recognize that's a little peculiar. In my defense, I'm not the first bibliophile guilty of cherishing a book nearly as much for its look and its feel in the hand as for its content. And, as I think about it, this appreciation for a book's shape and structure over, or aside from, its subject matter is an apt parallel to the main argument of The Elements of Style itself -- the idea that a clear conception of form, the mechanics of communicating ideas through writing, stands behind and makes possible the successful expression of intellectual content. The Strunk and White prescription, distilled, is this: Master the fundamentals of good form, and, assuming you have something to say, the results -- communication, style, art -- will take care of themselves.

Elements enthusiasts are in large supply -- the book has sold well over 10 million copies since 1959 -- and they tend to voice their praise with Strunkian directness. "Most books about writing are filled with bullshit," says Stephen King in his best-selling On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. "One notable exception is The Elements of Style. There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. Every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style." Strunk and White sit firmly in the top quarter of the Modern Library's list of 100 Best Nonfiction books. The Elements of Style is quoted and recommended warmly in scores of other guides to writing, from William Zinsser's On Writing Well and The Associated Press Stylebook to Barron's How to Prepare for the New SAT.

...

Customer Reviews

" 'The Elements of Style' is not a destination; it's a springboard."
Mark Garvey's well-researched "Stylized" is billed as "a slightly obsessive history of Strunk & White's 'The Elements of Style.'" Garvey is an unabashed fan who maintains that "ounce for ounce, this work has done more to establish an American ideal of good prose style than any other book or any teacher, living or dead." Garvey not only provides the reader with a history of "The Elements of Style" in all of its incarnations, but he also gives us a glimpse into the lives and personalities of its authors, William Strunk, Jr. and Elwyn Brooks White. Garvey likens these two men to Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Wright Brothers, and Lennon-McCartney; to him, they are the rock stars of fine writing.

Garvey entertainingly, humorously, and in great detail, traces "The Elements of Style" back to its inception. The first edition was self-published by Strunk, a professor of English at Cornell, in 1918. Strunk hoped that this handbook would ground his pupils in the fundamentals of English composition. At forty-three pages, it was intended as a handy manual, covering "the basics of clear and clean writing [with] tips on usage, composition, word choice, [and] spelling." The price was twenty-five cents and one of its purchasers was Strunk's student, E. B. White. At that time, White was a Cornell undergraduate, and he probably had no idea that he would someday become a renowned essayist, children's book author, and "the voice of the New Yorker magazine."

It was not until 1957 that White revisited "The Elements of Style," and wrote a New Yorker article about Strunk and his philosophy. This led to a collaboration between the Macmillan Publishing Company and E. B. White, who eventually updated Strunk's text. In the revised edition, published in 1959, White included a foreword, an introduction, and a final chapter, "An Approach to Style." Since that time, "The Elements of Style" has been updated repeatedly (most recently in 1999) and is still in print. However, is it still needed today, when most of us communicate almost exclusively via cell phone, email, text messages, and blogs? There are indeed those who proclaim that Strunk & White's ideas are outdated, irrelevant, or just plain wrongheaded--that their "rules" no longer apply in this postmodern era.

However, Garvey and other writers, some of whom speak out in "Stylized," believe that there are certain standards that never go out of date, "that careful, clear thinking and writing can occasionally touch truth; [that there is] depth in simplicity and beauty in plainness...." Those who admire Strunk and White will enjoy reading about their personal lives, professional accomplishments, and the delight that they took in the English language, good literature, and lucid writing. As long as we put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, there will be a treasured place for this little book in our personal libraries. As White's editor at Macmillan, J. G. Case once said, "Sloppy usage drives out meaning" and leads to "muddle, waste, frustration, [and] murk." The purpose of writing, he goes on to say, is "to transmit meaning, to enlighten and clarify...." This is as true today as it ever was.

Simply a good read!
Sylized is simply a good read! Whether or not you're a fan of Strunk and White's Elements of Style, you're sure to enjoy Mark Garvey's Stylized. His extensive research, interviews with authors, letters of Strunk, White, and others provide highly entertaining insight into the publishing and continued success of Elements of Style, the core values it espouses, as well as a look at the personalities of the two genetlemen responsible for the book. The letters alone are reason enough to read this book; the rest is icing on the cake. It's a well-written, entertaining, and smart book that would appeal to anyone who enjoys reading and/or writing.

Window onto a vanished world
I'm delighted that Mark Garvey has given us a history of _The Elements of Style_. The book provides a refuge for letters, commentary, and photos that could otherwise vanish before long. Probably this is why, somewhere midway, the book began to seem more of an elegy than mere history. I'm sure this was not Garvey's intention, but on the whole his work testifies to the diminishing influence of "Strunk & White" (even among its disciples) and especially to the sorry condition of the post-White edition of _Elements_ (the 4th).

To be clear, I think everyone should buy and enjoy this book. But know that you'll be enjoying a window onto a world that no longer exists. The first indication of this, sadly, is the quality of the writing by Garvey as well as by the writers he invited to contribute. It is noticeably un-Strunkian. Consider an early sample:

"Chapter III also contains the rule and the paragraph that constitutes Strunk's Sermon on the Mount, the nugget that cradles the book's DNA and that might be sufficient to reconstitute _The Elements of Style_ in its entirety should the rest of it, like heaven and earth, pass away" (15).

I want to enjoy this sentence, but I stick at the clash of images when I get to a nugget cradling a book's DNA. Also at the cumbersome non-meaning of "in its entirety." And also at the lumbering quality of the whole sentence. I don't think I'm quibbling over a single instance. Too often I came across sentences like this:

"The notion of style that White was honing with such skill and deploying in the service of _The New Yorker_--the attitudes and approaches that worked for him--would eventually be codified, to the extent that lightning can be successfully bottled, in Chapter V of _The Elements of Style_" (34).

There's too much stuffed into that sentence for it to exemplify the plain style. One giveaway is "successfully." It does nothing but deflate. Leave it out and see how punchy the phrase becomes. Over-qualification, ironic for a disciple of _Elements_, becomes Garvey's stylistic signature. Try this one: "...a physical typescript is a reassuring thing to see and hold in this age when books routinely travel the complete route from author to printing press in the digital realm without materializing, corporeally speaking, until they emerge from the bindery" (77). There's more to that sentence, but this excerpt alone reads like the left-hand, pre-revision sample from "Omit Needless Words." Why "routinely" travel? Why "complete" route?

But note, I'm not singling out Garvey. He represents a trend we are all part of now, even when we think we're being stylistic contrarians. One of the contributors to this book, Damon Lindelof, illustrates the state of prose composition today:

"One thing from _Elements_ that has stuck with me is the phrase 'omit needless words.' Why use fifteen words when four words will do? That's the thing that really struck me. And now, when I look over some of the creative writing I did in college, I can barely get through it; it's so unnecessarily and egregiously verbose" (88).

We see that Lindelof wants to be a good writer; he imagines he is a good writer. But he lacks the clarity or confidence to let the one word do its work, to call his juvenilia verbose. Like Lindelof, most of us reading this book will glide past the fact that we don't know, or can't trust, that verbose--already denoting the unnecessary and egregious--is enough. This has become the unremarked norm of our thinking and writing.

The elegiac quality of _Stylized_ comes from this unintended and unrecognized surrender to the prose conventions of today. One point of contention has been the effort of academic linguists to impose gender neutrality by abandoning the use of the masculine *he* as a generic English pronoun. A great pleasure of reading Garvey's book is encountering E. B. White's refusal to submit to this sort of thing. (See his immortal letter to Jack Case, p. 101: "I do know that this book is the work of a dead precisionist and a half-dead disciple of his, and that it has got to stay that way....I cannot, and will-shall not, attempt to adjust the unadjustable Mr. Strunk to the modern liberal of the English Department, the anything-goes fellow.")

Well, after White's death the publishers of the 4th edition of _Elements_ did indeed adjust the unadjustable Mr. Strunk. On the subject of *he* as the generic pronoun for expressions like "everyone" (having "lost all suggestion of maleness in these circumstances"), we move from this in the 3rd edition: "It has no pejorative connotation; it is never incorrect," to this in the 4th: "Currently many writers find the use of the generic *he* or *his* to rename indefinite antecedents limiting or offensive....Consider these strategies to avoid an awkward overuse of *he or she* or an unintentional emphasis on the masculine" (60). The de-emphasis of the masculine, performed by an unnamed committee of revisers, permeates the 4th edition.

White knew as well as anybody that revisions would be necessary. The trick for us, in his absence, is discerning whether the change enhances the precision, even the honesty, of our writing. Revision might, after all, constitute something else, like submission to what Orwell called "the smelly orthodoxies" contending for our souls. I think White's Introduction to _Elements_ as it appears in the 4th edition helps us discern rightly. Consider this excerpt:

"Will [Strunk] felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get the reader up on dry ground, or at least to throw a rope" (xviii).

The editors of the 4th edition appended this note: "E. B. White wrote this introduction for the 1979 edition." But this is not true. What he actually wrote can be dug out of used copies of the 3rd edition. Here it is:

"Will felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, a man floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get his man up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope" (xvi).

You can object to the revision on two counts: first, stylistically, it chills the human warmth of the original and falsifies English idiom in order to advance a social agenda; second, morally, it is profoundly dishonest. Future generations will have no clue that the words they find in post-3rd-edition versions are not White's, that they are misconstruing White's attitude to his subject and to its stylistic treatment. The implications of this for Garvey's book are significant. _Stylized_ purports to be a history of the composing and editing of _Elements_ within the frame of White's conception of the plain style. Moreover, Garvey reinforces continually White's view of writing plainly as writing morally. It would be inexcusable to ignore the 4th edition's violation of White's fundamental stylistic and moral principles. To his credit, Garvey acknowledges the problematic aspects of the 4th edition. But then his nerve fails. He maintains that the publisher, in altering White's text in this controversial way, "made the right decision, the only decision they could have made, and they handled it neatly" (163). Approval like this is miles apart from White's own independent spirit, and it suggests an anxious accommodation to the Zeitgeist that White loathed: "the flagging spirit, the moistened finger in the wind, the examination of entrails, and the fear of little men" (_Stylized_ 101).

On this point I return to my opening claim about _Stylized_. It illuminates the rich cultural and personal backdrop behind _The Elements of Style_. Very readable, in its way, and enjoyable. But a poignant recognition forms an inescapable part of that enjoyment: "Strunk & White" impresses us with a stylistic clarity and moral firmness that we cannot claim for ourselves or for the edition published when White was too dead to speak for himself.