The Elements of Style | A Potentially Confusing Work
Blevins’s is a poet and essayist who has taught at Hollins University, Sweet Briar College, and in the Virginia Community College system; Blevins’ first full-length collection of poems, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, is forthcoming from Ausable Press in September of 2003. In this essay, Blevins argues that The Elements of Style is potentially confusing because it sometimes confuses grammatical and mechanical competence with actual literary merit.
The Elements of Style is, as E. B. White admits in its introduction, ‘‘a dusty rulebook.’’ It governs everything from how to make possessive singular nouns plural to why the active voice is preferable to the passive. The majority of the book is Will Strunk’s attempt, as E. B. White says in his introduction to the third edition, ‘‘to cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin.’’ In so doing, The Elements of Style promotes a philosophy of composition whose first tenet is the idea that...
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