E. B. White

One of Mark Twain’s rules for good writing held that the author shall “say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.” By example and by precept, E. B. White, dead at 86, taught several generations of American writers how to put Twain’s principle into practice.

Older writers remember the spare, surprising wit of White’s work for The New Yorker, collected now in books; younger ones, their first encounter with romance, exactly rendered, in “Charlotte’s Web” and “The Trumpet of the Swan.”

White’s 71-page edition of William Strunk Jr.’s “The Elements of Style” has done more to advance the cause of plain American English than any other modern book. This paragraph by White from it can serve well enough as his monument:

“The language is perpetually in flux: It is a living stream, shifting, changing, receiving new strength from a thousand tributaries, losing old forms in the backwaters of time. To suggest that a young writer not swim in the mainstream of this turbulence would be foolish indeed, and such is not the intent of these cautionary remarks. The intent is to suggest that in choosing the formal and the informal, the regular and the offbeat, the general and the special, the orthodox and the heretical, the beginner err on the side of conservatism, on the side of established usage. No idiom is taboo, no accent forbidden; there is simply a better chance of doing well if the writer holds a steady course, enters the stream of English quietly, and does not thrash about.”