William Strunk Jr. (1869–1946) was an American professor of English at Cornell University. He was the author of The Elements of Style (1918.)
Born and reared in Cincinnati, Ohio, Strunk earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Cincinnati in 1890 and a PhD at Cornell University in 1896. He then studied morphology and philology at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France.
Strunk taught mathematics at Rose Polytechnical Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana, 1890–91 before becoming an English Literature professor at Cornell for 46 years. He published many scholarly works and critical editions of prominent historical authors.
Strunk published The Elements of Style (1918) privately for the use of his Cornell students. In 1935, he and Edward A. Tenney revised and published the guide as The Elements and Practice of Composition (1935.)
Two decades later, author E. B. White, a former Cornell student of Strunk, revised and enlarged it. Popular to this day, The Elements of Style (1959,) commonly called “Strunk & White,” remains a highly influential guide to grammatical and stylistic guidance in English usage.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William Strunk, Jr.
Omit needless words. 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.
—William Strunk, Jr.
Topics: Writing, Brevity
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