In the Library
The Elements of Style
William Strunk Jr., 1918
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 60 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 5
- Length
- Length 14k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
Omit needless words.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Politics and the English Language
George Orwell
Orwell does the same thing, but turns the argument political, showing how vague, padded prose is not just weak writing but a tool of dishonest thinking.
£1.99
Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke answers a beginner's letters with the other half of Strunk's advice: not how to cut a sentence, but whether you must write at all, and how to bear it.
£1.99
About the book
A Cornell professor printed forty-three pages for his students in 1918, calling them rules of usage and principles of composition, and gave them to a young man in his class named Elwyn Brooks White. William Strunk had compiled them; E.B. White, later a New Yorker essayist, returned to the booklet, expanded it, and published the edition in print since 1959. The rules are spare and absolute: omit needless words, use the active voice, choose a suitable design and hold to it. The book treats prose as a moral discipline, the writer's first duty being clarity to the reader. The pamphlet is shorter than the works it has improved, and its rules are loved most by writers who learned when to break them.