The Elements of Style

In The Elements of Style (1918), William Strunk concentrated on specific questions of usage—and the cultivation of good writing—with the recommendation “Make every word tell”; hence, the 17th principle of composition is the simple instruction: “Omit needless words.” The 1959 edition features White’s expansions of those sections, the “Introduction” essay (derived from his magazine feature story about Prof. Strunk), and the concluding chapter, “An Approach to Style”, a broader, prescriptive guide to writing in English. He also produced the second (1972) and third (1979) editions of The Elements of Style, by which time the book’s length had extended to 85 pages.