A review by cubehead27
The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr

informative

I read a copy of this from the shelf of the writing centre where I work during unbooked hours. I had hoped to find a copy of the later Strunk-White edition, but since I have read E.B. White's introduction before I'm not intolerably disappointed. I did find a great deal of value in the book - Strunk's formal explanations of things I've mostly navigated by instinct are really very eye-opening. I did also find him less of a prescriptivist than I was expecting. That said, he is still fairly uncompromising and rigid on many fronts, sometimes to his detriment. For one, his view of what is "correct" in academic writing is (obviously) very in line with Standard Language Ideology, and as a fan of Vershawn Ashanti Young's work on this subject I can't help grinding my teeth a little at several points. In certain sections (particularly in his list of commonly misused words), Strunk's complete preference for clarity and good grammatical flow causes him to declare a preference for one word, phrase, or construction over another, when in fact the two constructions he contrasts have distinct meanings. (For example, his preference for "students" over "student body", and "dormitories" over "the dormitory system.") As such, his total preference for clear, concise, and readable writing is sometimes extended so far as to obscure the precise meaning a writer may be trying to communicate.