The War on Strunk and White

Be clear, they said, and, by God, clarity is what they got. Sentences that zinged by like bullets—bang, a shot rings out, and bang, the man at the bar with a whiskey sour slumps over dead, and bang, the lights go out, leaving nothing much to notice, except the screaming.

Dave Clark

They hated conjunctions and sentence adverbs, did Strunk and White, our lucid boys, our apostles of a briefer gospel. “Omit needless words,” demanded The Elements of Style. You remember the book, of course. A 1919 writing manual from an English professor named William Strunk Jr., mostly forgotten until his famous student E.B. White revised the text in 1959, added his name to the front cover, and sold over 10 million of the things—mostly to people needing going-away-to-college presents for their nieces and nephews. Who eventually grew up, got jobs, worked for 20 years, and discovered they remembered little from school except that they ought to buy the book for their own college-bound nieces and nephews.

As it happens, I love all those complicated conjunctive phrases that Strunk and White despised: in the event, however, whereupon, and yet. I love the way they feel at the beginning of a sentence—the way they grease the slide from one phrase to another, with an unctuous nod toward the structures of logic as they slip by. For that matter, passive constructions are used with glee by most of the writers I admire. Which would be a telling point against Strunk and White’s commandment “Use the active voice,” except that the pair don’t actually seem to know what active and passive voices are.