Editing The Elements of Style (section)

==Content==
Strunk concentrated on the cultivation of good writing and composition; the original 1918 edition exhorted writers to "omit needless words," use the [[active voice]], and employ [[Parallelism (grammar)|parallelism]] appropriately.<ref>Strunk and White (2009), p. 23.</ref>

The 1959 edition features White's expansions of preliminary sections, the "Introduction" essay (derived from his magazine story about Strunk), and the concluding chapter, "An Approach to Style," a broader, prescriptive guide to writing in English. He also produced the second (1972) and third (1979) editions of ''The Elements of Style'', by which time the book's length had extended to 85 pages.

The third edition of ''The Elements of Style'' (1979) features 54 points: a list of common word-usage errors; 11 rules of punctuation and grammar; 11 principles of writing; 11 matters of form; and, in Chapter V, 21 reminders for better style. The final reminder, the 21st, "Prefer the standard to the offbeat," is thematically integral to the subject of ''The Elements of Style'', yet it does stand as a discrete essay about writing lucid prose.<ref name="Style, p.xiii" /> To write well, White advises writers to have the proper mindset, that they write to please themselves, and that they aim for "one moment of felicity," a phrase by [[Robert Louis Stevenson]].<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TKptCkp-EjwC&q=%22one+moment+of+felicity%22+robert+louis+stevenson&pg=PA179|title=Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition|last=Brody|first=Miriam|date=1993|publisher=SIU Press|isbn=9780809316915|pages=179|language=en}}</ref> Thus Strunk's 1918 recommendation:

{{blockquote|Vigorous writing is concise. 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. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell. |"Elementary Principles of Composition", ''The Elements of Style''<ref>{{cite book |author=William Strunk |title=The Elements of Style |year=1918}}</ref>}}

Strunk Jr.  no longer has a comma in his name in the 1979 and later editions, due to the modernized style recommendation about punctuating such names.

The fourth edition of ''The Elements of Style'' (1999) omits Strunk's advice about masculine pronouns: "unless the antecedent is or must be feminine".<ref>{{cite book |last=Strunk |first = William |author2=E. B. White |title = The Elements of Style |publisher = Plain Label Books |edition = 2nd |orig-year=1959 |year = 1972 |pages = 55–56 |isbn = 978-1-60303-050-2 |url = https://books.google.com/books?id=Hd5o74IehyoC&pg=PA55 |access-date = 2009-07-23}}</ref> In its place, the book reads, "many writers find the use of the generic ''he'' or ''his'' to rename indefinite antecedents limiting or offensive." The re-titled entry "They. He or She", in Chapter IV: Misused Words and Expressions, advises the writer to avoid an "unintentional emphasis on the masculine".<ref name="Strunk-1999-p60">{{cite book |last = Strunk |first = William |author2 = E. B. White |title = The Elements of Style |publisher = Allyn & Bacon |location = Boston |edition = 4th |orig-year = 1959 |year = 1999 |page = [https://archive.org/details/elementsofs00stru/page/60 60] |isbn = 978-0-205-31342-6 |oclc = 41548201 |url = https://archive.org/details/elementsofs00stru/page/60 |access-date = 2009-07-23 }}</ref><ref>Compare [[s:The Elements of Style/Misuse#They.|entry "They."]] in Chapter IV of the 1918 edition. See also [[gender-specific pronoun]]s.</ref>

Components new to the fourth edition include a foreword by essayist and E. B. White stepson [[Roger Angell]], a glossary, and an index. Five years later, the fourth edition text was re-published as ''The Elements of Style Illustrated'' (2005), with illustrations by the designer [[Maira Kalman]].