History
Cornell University English professor William Strunk, Jr., wrote The Elements of Style in 1918, and privately published it in 1919, for in-house use at the university. Later, for publication, he and editor Edward A. Tenney revised it as The Elements and Practice of Composition (1935). In 1957, at The New Yorker, the style guide reached the attention of E. B. White, who had studied writing under Strunk in 1919, but had since forgotten "the little book" that he described as a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English." Weeks later, White wrote a feature story about Strunk's devotion to lucid English prose.
Macmillan and Company publishers subsequently commissioned White to revise the 41-year-old text of The Elements of Style (1918) for a 1959 edition (Strunk had died in 1946). White's expansion and modernization of Strunk's 1935 revised edition yielded the writing style manual informally known as Strunk & White, the first edition of which sold approximately two million copies in 1959. In the ensuing four decades, more than ten million copies of three editions have been sold. The history of this writing manual is told in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style (2009), by Mark Garvey.
Read more about this topic: The Elements Of Style
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
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“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)