This post was originally published on this site
A century ago, a Cornell University student took an English class taught by a professor out of step with what even then was an age of volubility.
Professor William Strunk Jr. lived by the rule, “Omit needless words!” He had trouble filling his appointed hour, wrote then-student E.B. White, who later would revise Strunk’s brief classic “The Elements of Style.”
“In those days when I was sitting in his class,” White writes, “he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he seemed in the position of having shortchanged himself—a man left with nothing more to say yet time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock.”
Strunk escaped this predicament by uttering every sentence three times, White writes. Strunk leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels, and in a husky, conspiratorial voice, said, “Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!”
Few books have been as influential in American prose—and indeed, worldwide—as the one widely known as “Strunk and White.” In the 100th anniversary of E.B. White’s rhetorical epiphany on the road to discursive Damascus, we at Ragan Communications are reacquainting ourselves with Strunk and White’s pithy work. It since has been revised with a new foreword by White’s stepson, the New Yorker writer Roger Angell.
In an occasional (and brief!) series of stories, we will plumb the lessons of “The Elements of Style.” Though the main text is the book’s core,