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The Elements of Style is one of the most well-known and influential style guides for American English writing. English professor William Strunk Jr. originally wrote it in 1918, and his student E.B. White published a revised version in 1959.
The Elements of Style Quotes in On Writing Well
The On Writing Well quotes below are all either spoken by The Elements of Style or refer to The Elements of Style. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Introduction
Quotes
One of the pictures hanging in my office in mid-Manhattan is a photograph of the writer E. B. White. It was taken by Jill Krementz when White was 77 years old, at his home in North Brooklin, Maine. A white-haired man is sitting on a plain wooden bench at a plain wooden table—three boards nailed to four legs—in a small boathouse. The window is open to a view across the water. White is typing on a manual typewriter, and the only other objects are an ashtray and a nail keg. The keg, I don’t have to be told, is his wastebasket.
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The Elements of Style Term Timeline in On Writing Well
The timeline below shows where the term The Elements of Style appears in On Writing Well. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
...teach it any better than White did in his revised version of William Strunk Jr.’s The Elements of Style . Instead, Zinsser decided to write a book about how to apply Strunk and White’s...
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Chapter 6: Words
...how their sentences sound, not just how they look. As E.B. White pointed out in The Elements of Style , famous sentences lose their power when they’re rearranged. Zinsser suggests reading everything out loud...
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