If you visit Morris Bookshop or Joseph-Beth, you’ll find shelves of books dedicated to helping you improve your writing. They’re often hardcover tomes with sprawling titles and subtitles. It’s easy to miss “The Elements of Style,” by far the best of the bunch.
“Elements” is a thin paperback, 105 pages long, and fits in your back pocket. It’s nearly 100 years old. If you read it front to finish, you may not need another writing book in your life.
It contains only this:
• Seven elementary rules of usage (e.g., form the possessive singular of nouns by adding ’s).
• Eleven elementary principles of composition (my favorite: omit needless words).
• A few matters of form (such as when to use headings and hyphens).
• Commonly misused words (among them: hopefully, that and which).
• Twenty-one reminders about writing style (for example, write in a way that comes naturally and do not explain too much).
The book has a fascinating history. It was self-published in 1918 by Cornell University professor William Strunk Jr., for use by Strunk and his students (it was fewer than 50 pages at the time). One of Strunk’s students, E.B. White, would go on to write “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little.”
White also would become an editor at The New Yorker magazine, where in 1957, he rediscovered a copy of “Elements.” Strunk had died 10 years earlier, and White secured the rights to update and republish his late professor’s book.
Since then, more than 10 million copies have been sold. I bought mine in the 1970s for $1.25. “Elements” still goes for less than $10, and it sells briskly. Last week, it was the No. 1 book on Amazon in the “writing skills” category and No. 132 among all books.
Why is “Elements” so enduring? Clarity, boldness, brevity. In his introduction to the revised edition, White expressed awe that his old professor could successfully “cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin.”
Neil Chethik, aka the Grammar Gourmet, is executive director of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning (www.carnegiecenterlex. org) and author of “FatherLoss” and “Voice- Male.” The Carnegie Center off ers writing classes and seminars for businesses and individuals. Contact Chethik at neil@carnegiecenterlex.org or 859-254-4175.