2024年4月8日发(作者：)

The Element of Style

Foreword*

THE FIRST writer I watched at work was my stepfather, E. B. White. Each

Tuesday morning, he would close his study door and sit down to write the

"Notes and Comment" page for The New Yorker. The task was familiar to him —

he was required to file a few hundred words of editorial or personal

commentary on some topic in or out of the news that week — but the sounds of

his typewriter from his room came in hesitant bursts, with long silences in

between. Hours went by. Summoned at last for lunch, he was silent and

preoccupied, and soon excused himself to get back to the job. When the copy

went off at last, in the afternoon RFD pouch — we were in Maine, a day's

mail away from New York — he rarely seemed satisfied. "It isn't good

enough," he said sometimes. "I wish it were better."

Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time. Less frequent

practitioners — the job applicant; the business executive with an annual

report to get out; the high school senior with a Faulkner assignment; the

graduate-school student with her thesis proposal; the writer of a letter of

condolence — often get stuck in an awkward passage or find a muddle on their

screens, and then blame themselves. What should be easy and flowing looks

tangled or feeble or overblown — not what was meant at all. What's wrong

with me, each one thinks. Why can't I get this right?

It was this recurring question, put to himself, that must have inspired White

to revive and add to a textbook by an English professor of his, Will Strunk

Jr., that he had first read in college, and to get it published. The result,

this quiet book, has been in print for forty years, and has offered more than

ten million writers a helping hand. White knew that a compendium of specific

tips — about singular and plural verbs, parentheses, the "that" — "which"

scuffle, and many others — could clear up a recalcitrant sentence or

subclause when quickly reconsulted, and that the larger principles needed to

be kept in plain sight, like a wall sampler.

How simple they look, set down here in White's last chapter: "Write in a way

that comes naturally," "Revise and rewrite," "Do not explain too much," and

the rest; above all, the cleansing, clarion "Be clear." How often I have

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turned to them, in the book or in my mind, while trying to start or unblock

or revise some piece of my own writing! They help — they really do. They

work. They are the way.

E. B. White's prose is celebrated for its ease and clarity — just think of

Charlotte's Web — but maintaining this standard required endless attention.

When the new issue of The New Yorker turned up in Maine, I sometimes saw him

reading his "Comment" piece over to himself, with only a slightly different

expression than the one he'd worn on the day it went off. Well, O.K., he

seemed to be saying. At least I got the elements right.

This edition has been modestly updated, with word processors and air

conditioners making their first appearance among White's references, and with

a light redistribution of genders to permit a feminine pronoun or female

farmer to take their places among the males who once innocently served him.

Sylvia Plath has knocked Keats out of the box, and I notice that "America"

has become "this country" in a sample text, to forestall a subsequent and

possibly demeaning "she" in the same paragraph. What is not here is anything

about E-mail — the rules-free, lower-case flow that cheerfully keeps us in

touch these days. E-mail is conversation, and it may be replacing the sweet

and endless talking we once sustained (and tucked away) within the informal

letter. But we are all writers and readers as well as communicators, with the

need at times to please and satisfy ourselves (as White put it) with the

clear and almost perfect thought.

Roger Angell

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Introduction*

AT THE close of the first World War, when I was a student at Cornell, I took

a course called English 8. My professor was William Strunk Jr. A textbook

required for the course was a slim volume called The Elements of Style, whose

author was the professor himself. The year was 1919. The book was known on

the campus in those days as "the little book," with the stress on the word

"little." It had been privately printed by the author.

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