The Elements of Style
 First expanded edition (1959) | |
| Author |
|
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Maira Kalman (2005 only) |
| Subject | American English style guide |
| Publisher |
|
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (paperback) |
| Pages | 43 (1918), 52 (1920), 71 (1959), 105 (1999) |
| OCLC | 27652766 |
| Dewey Decimal | 808/.042 21 |
| LC Class | PE1421 .S7 (Strunk) PE1408 .S772 (Strunk & White) |
The Elements of Style (also Strunk & White) is a writing style guide for American English, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage," ten "elementary principles of composition", "a few matters of form", a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused", and a list of 57 "words often misspelled". The first edition was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920. Thirty-five years later, the writer and editor E. B. White revised and expanded the Strunk & White style guide for publication by Macmillan Publishers in 1959; it was this edition which Time magazine recognized in 2011 as one of the hundred best and most influential non-fiction books in English since 1923.
About Strunk & White, the writer Dorothy Parker said that:
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.