3.1: Strunk and White Set the Standard

Author: Laura Lisabeth, St. John’s University

The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, is well loved by many writers and teachers as the ultimate reference book on Standard English. Ask any writer or editor, and they are likely to have one of its four editions on their bookshelves or will remember it from some phase of their education. A recent survey of over a million college syllabi showed that The Elements of Style is the number one, most-assigned book in English-speaking countries and is also listed in the top ten assigned texts for almost every discipline. It is difficult to imagine that a book this popular with college professors and currently ranked first in sales on four different Amazon lists originated as a 43-page, self-published pamphlet a century ago.

Strunk first assigned The Elements of Style as a handbook of punctuation and usage in his advanced composition class at Cornell University in 1918. The popular writer E. B. White (who had been Strunk’s student in 1920), along with the Macmillan Publishing Company, turned Strunk’s pamphlet into a slightly longer version and published it in 1959. It included minor updates of Strunk’s original portion and a new chapter on style, introducing White’s signature essayistic voice into the book. Based largely on White’s reputation as a prolific writer of short pieces for Harper’s and The New Yorker, The Elements of Style immediately became associated with a tradition of the best English language: grammatically correct, tasteful, clear, and organized prose.

But even in 1959, The Elements of Style was greeted with criticism by the field of college composition for being vague and misleading about the complex act of learning to compose academic writing. Its current appearance on so many course syllabi across the disciplines suggests a persistent dissatisfaction teachers have with the quality of student writing coupled with the misguided belief that one writing handbook can solve the problem. But more importantly, the kind of writing Strunk and White put forth as good writing is in fact a discourse that limits and excludes, not reflecting the valuable ways English is practiced in local and digital contexts and by a variety of writers from different language traditions. Insistence on the kind of English constructed by The Elements of Style is uninformed at best and, as I will show, unethical and racist at worst.

The genre to which The Elements of Style belongs—the writing handbook—is rooted in the mid-19thcentury handbook of conversation, a type of etiquette guide. Conversation handbooks became wildly popular when the prevailing cultural structure in pre-Civil War America was shifting power from an inherited social hierarchy to a larger self-made middle class. Guides to gentility were an aid to self-propelled social mobility and included elaborate rules for every kind of behavior imaginable, including a standard language usage that marked a speaker or writer as both apart from the socially inferior and fit for engaging with society’s elite people.

When Strunk and White’s style of English is prescribed as the dominant discourse taught in schools and used in other authorized places, it marginalizes the identities, knowledge, and being of many people who come from other literacy practices. Literacy is always attached to the deep ways of knowing embedded in language practices that are localized to different cultures. An individual’s cultural or racial identity is often closely linked to specific language practices that are not recognized in school where anything outside of Standard English is framed as error. This connection points to the fact that all literacies, Standard Academic English included, are not neutral but are ideological—always structuring social power as measured against themselves. Believing the Strunk and White style to be the best way to write suggests that Standard Academic English is a neutral transcription system for a universal reality and, therefore, a universal good. But, in fact, as literacy researchers argue, the English language cannot be understood apart from the many contexts in which it is embedded: home, school, workplaces, and social groups. It is not something fixed and unchanging, as the age and minimally revised text of The Elements of Style might suggest. Sociolinguists point to the ways English is already operating as a flexible medium, repurposed by American users to include, for example, Black and Latinx variations and the language and punctuation of social media, all of which expand the expressiveness of English and make it relevant to more users. These culturally and linguistically inflected ways of using English help people negotiate the identities and knowledges inherent in all the contexts in which people use language. Access to such uses of language can help many emerging academic writers to develop more competence and to perform better in school as they capitalize on existing meaningful ways of expressing knowledge.

Paradoxically, despite the public’s positive associations with prescriptive English as defined in The Elements of Style, the discourse has often been called into question by educational leaders who denounce its ineffectiveness in the teaching of writing as well as question the ethics of insisting on its use in a diverse and democratic society. As far back as 1932, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) published a survey of American cultivated English usage showing that the well-educated group of adults who responded rarely abided by the strict usage rules of writing handbooks. At the time, NCTE president Ruth Weeks predicted that the survey’s findings revealing a democratization of language in the world outside school would prove that writing handbooks like The Elements of Style were useless and that American students were being unfairly judged by a classed and arbitrary set of standards for their writing. In 1974, the NCTE published a more monumental statement against the continued educational emphasis on Standard English usage. “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” holds that teachers of writing must respect the languages students bring with them to school, claiming “[L]anguage scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity.”

One way to begin dismantling Strunk and White’s bad idea about writing is by understanding Standard Academic English as a historically formed, culturally specific language among many other languages. Reframe the notion of academic writing as a fixed, unchanging, and neutral discourse; think of it instead as a flexible toolkit of language practices that change with the user and the context. Many other literacies that could never conform to a Strunk and White standard continue to enrich ideas of what counts as good writing. With the unfolding of new media language practices, digital literacies are emerging to enable writers to compose discourse beyond anything Strunk and White could have imagined. These networked ways of writing, along with social-media inspired ways of thinking about punctuation, continue to explode definitions for what constitutes meaningful language and educated English.

Further Reading

For further reading on the ideologies of Standard English and the social situatedness of literacy, see Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways With Words (Cambridge University), Brian Street’s Literacy in Theory and Practice (Cambridge University), and James Paul Gee’s Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideologies In Discourses (Routledge). Heath’s ethnography of two working class towns—one white and one African American—critiques what she calls the autonomous model of literacy, often prevalent in schools, which treats Standard English as a neutral discourse, free of ideology. Gee argues that to understand literacy we must consider the social context in which that literacy takes place.

There are several good books and articles that interrogate specific values of Standard English. Richard Ohmann’s “Use Definite Specific Concrete Language” (College English) and Ian Barnard’s Upsetting Composition Commonplaces (Utah State University) discuss the ideology implied in the concept of clarity, arguing that this value in writing forecloses the complex language necessary for critical inquiry of social conditions. Richard Lanham’s books Style: An Anti-Textbook (Paul Dry Books) and Revising Prose (Continuum) point to the clarity-brevity-sincerity approach to writing as limiting and problematic.

For further reading about the history of Standard English usage in education, see “Students Right To Their Own Language,” NCTE’s “Resolution On Language” (1974), and the NCTE publication Current English Usage by Sterling Andrus Leonard (1932), historical documents showing English educators’ awareness of the contingent nature of English language usage conventions.

Keywords

grammar, literacies, Standard English, style, writing handbook

Author Bio

Laura Lisabeth is an adjunct associate professor at St. John’s University. Her research is the cultural history of The Elements of Style. She enjoys exploring the intersections of college composition, publishing, and academic and public cultures that form the historical backdrop of each edition of this popular style guide. She is also interested in how new ways of thinking about academic writing might provide counternarratives to Strunk and White’s style and a more socially just language culture.