NARR: Anyone who’s been to school in the past fifty years has probably heard this advice before:

AX // Strunk&White audiobook // OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

NARR: That advice, of course, comes from The Elements of Style. It became an instant bestseller when it was published in 1959. Since then legions of budding writers have taken its prescriptions of simplicity, clarity and precision to heart.

A crowd of language lovers packed into the Museum of the City of New York yesterday to toast the birthday of the little composition guide. (fade up ambi of crowd) Writer Lauren Lipton recalled her introduction to the book by a ninth-grade English teacher.

AX // Lipton // What I found was I loved rules, I loved the rules. I loved knowing every single place that comma was supposed to be. I loved taking out the “that’s.” I loved all of it. (0:10)

Lipton says that grammatical rules actually free writers and can be an unexpected source of creativity. Maira Kalman is an artist known for her whimsical children’s books and her illustrated columns in the New York Times. She discovered an old edition of the Elements of Style at a yard sale.

AX // Maira Kalman // I realized that this was a book that was a treasure of humor and craziness and eccentricity. (0:04)

So she decided to illustrate it. Her book takes some of Strunk and White’s humor and illustrates it with brightly colored paintings filled with visual puns.

After illustrating the book, Kalman commissioned composer Nico Muhly to put the words to music.

AX // audiobook // Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!!
(fade up music to “Be obscure clearly!” and then fade down)

University of Edinburgh linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum is not a fan of the Elements of Style. He says that the book is full of strange, outdated and even flat-out incorrect dictates for grammar and usage and its style advice largely useless.

AX// One of the big problems with advice like omit needless words is that if you understood what words were needless, then you’re already expert and wouldn’t need to be told that. (0:09)


Back at the birthday celebration, writer Roy Blount Jr. said the book’s message—keeping your prose clear and straightforward—has been a gift for him.

AX // Blount // Streamlining and efficiency and beautiful design will always be not only valuable but necessary, and that’s what this book is about. (0:11)

That’s a message, he says, that’s just as true now as it was fifty years ago.

Maura Walz, Columbia Radio News.