DISCOVERIES

FONDLY called “the little book” by students of William Strunk Jr. at Cornell, “The Elements of Style” was first commercially published in 1959, when Macmillan commissioned New Yorker writer E.B. White to revise the professor’s privately printed textbook for “the college market and the general trade.” Strunk’s edition, as used in his English 8 class, was indeed a “tiny thing” (“Seven rules of usage, eleven principles of composition, a few matters of form, and a list of words and expressions commonly misused”). Even when White was through with it, as he notes in his introduction to the 1979 edition, it was “still a tiny thing, a barely tarnished gem.”

This is certainly gracious but not entirely true. Real liftoff occurs in the formidable Chapter V: “An Approach to Style (With a List of Reminders)” -- a chapter added entirely by the humble White. “Here,” he warns readers, “we leave solid ground.”

Throughout Chapters I, II, III and IV, the reader has gently been encouraged to “omit needless words” (a warning that Strunk would often repeat three times in class), avoid “tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language,” eschew exclamation points (except after exclamations), keep modifiers within range of the words they modify, watch for verb agreement and the proper case of pronouns and “[p]lace the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.”

We are told the difference between “among” and “between,” “allusion” and “illusion,” “aggravate” and “irritate,” “farther” and “further,” “comprise” and “constitute,” “tortuous” and “torturous.” We are told that “[r]ich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.”

By Chapter V, an ordinary reader may feel a little tired, a little hungry, a little overwhelmed by particulars. Writing, say, a piece of experimental prose seems entirely out of the question. The authors have foreseen this inhibiting effect. In White’s introduction, Strunk is quoted as remarking that “the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric” -- but only, he admonishes, after they have weighed “the cost of the violation.”

White strikes the same note in his chapter on style. If you’re going to step outside the rules, he warns again and again, you’d better be good.

“To achieve style, begin by affecting none” is perhaps the finest advice ever given a writer. (“Practice anonymity,” warned Virginia Woolf.) “Cock your ear,” writes White, and listen to language. Attempt dialect only if you are certain you have a good ear. “The sense and substance of the writing” trumps “the mood and temper of the author.” Watch out for the language of advertising, which White calls “the language of mutilation.” Always err “on the side of established usage.”

Stern words. Conservative words. Timeless. But what makes this new edition so friendly, so classic, so delightful, is the addition of Maira Kalman’s whimsical paintings, with sample sentences from the text serving as their captions. Kalman, who is an illustrator of children’s books, a fabric designer for Isaac Mizrahi and Kate Spade, and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, imparts an “Eloise” feeling to her drawings. There is a bit of Roz Chast here and something of Saul Steinberg; all the ego and humor and distance of that self-important little island of his is contained in her illustrations. Kalman has taken “the little book” and made it even more elegant and uplifting.