The Elements of Style

The Elements of Style is an American English how-to-do-it writing style guide. It lists brief guidelines for writing simple English. The book ran to many reprints.

The original was composed by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and was published by Harcourt in 1920. It had eight "elementary rules of usage", ten "elementary principles of composition", "a few matters of form", a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused", and a list of 57 "words often misspelled".

E. B. White much enlarged and revised the book for publication by Macmillan, in 1959. That was the first edition of the so-called "Strunk & White", which Time called in 2011 "one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923".

The first printing of the 1959 edition sold about two million copies. In the following four decades, more than ten million copies of the three printings (1959 edition, 1972 edition, and 1988 edition) have been sold.