Books That Can Change Your Life : ‘Elements of Style,’ ‘Charlotte’s Web’ Are Examples

It has been a while now since E. B. White died. The day after the news was made public, a student asked at the beginning of class: “Hey, was that the guy who wrote our book that died yesterday?” It was.

People who read books in earnest are bound to have their favorites. There are books you like, there are books you love, and there are books that affect you so strongly that after you have read them, you have difficulty recalling what life was like without them. For any given individual, there aren’t likely to be many books in this last category. My own list is short enough. But on that list there appears, to my continuing amazement, one textbook. It is “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White.

When White was a student at Cornell in 1919 he took English from William Strunk Jr. Strunk referred to the book that he had written for the course as “the little book.” In 1957, after Strunk’s death, the Macmillan Co., inspired by a Higher Power, approached White to revise his former teacher’s work. He did so, adding a chapter and updating rules and examples.

The third (and, it appears, last) edition, published in 1972, is 85 pages long. I first reread this small book several years ago. Several year earlier, at roughly the age when I came to see that I didn’t really want to be a cowboy, I had decided that I wanted to be a writer. Subsequently, I studied writing at a great university. I taught writing. I even began to make my living at it, after a fashion. When, after all of this, I read “The Elements of Style” for the first time, it came as a gentle revelation. It put things in place. It helped me, as no other book has, to write better.

Each year, American textbook publishers generate dozens of new books about how to write. I have looked closely at many of them and have read a few. Many students find Strunk and White difficult at first; some have asked for more direction, more examples, more advice. I have thought about using a different textbook. But I have not done so. To do so, I think, would be to condescend to my students. Some of these new books are well done in their way, some written by good writers. But I always ask, when I look at such a book, whether I would turn to it myself, whether this book would help me to write better. And the answer, so far, has always been “no.” The reason is that I would first turn to Strunk and White. So much has this little book invaded my own thought and, I hope, practice that I can hardly imagine how I managed to write without it.

The core of the book is Strunk’s work. But White did something that we seldom see these days: He took a very good thing and made it better. He took a book which was perhaps the best book of its kind; when he finished with it, it was perhaps the only book of its kind.

When I was in the fourth grade our teacher read aloud to the class one of White’s other works: “Charlotte’s Web.” She read the whole book. It took about two weeks. It is what I remember best, and most gladly, about fourth grade. The book moved me deeply then, and, if you must know, it still does. I was impressed then, and still am, by the skill with which Charlotte (the spider) achieved great effects by weaving a few well-chosen words into her web. In later years I have had this fancy: Perhaps Charlotte, unbeknownst even to her author, snuck out from between the pages some lonely night and honed her literary skills on “the little book.” For surely her example is an unsurpassed application of Rule 17: Omit needless words. Unsurpassed except, perhaps, by “The Elements of Style.”