Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time. What should be easy and flowing looks tangled or feeble or overblown — not what was meant at all.

We are all writers and readers as well as communicators, with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought.

• Write in a way that comes naturally.
• Revise and rewrite.
• Do not explain too much.
• Be clear

In its original form, it was a forty-three page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English. Today, fifty-two years later, z and for sheer pith I think it probably sets a record that is not likely to be broken.

Even after I got through tampering with it, it was still a tiny thing, a barely tarnished gem. Seven rules of usage, eleven principles of composition, a few matters of form, and a list of words and expressions commonly misused — that was the sum and substance of Professor Strunk’s work. Somewhat audaciously, and in an attempt to give my publisher his money’s worth, I added a chapter called “An Approach to Style,” setting forth my own prejudices, my notions of error, my articles of faith.

Chapter IV has been refurbished with words and expressions of a recent vintage.

Fresh example have been added to some of the rules and principles, amplification has reared its head in a few places in the text where I felt an assault could successfully be made on the bastions of its brevity, and in general the book has received a thorough overhaul – to correct errors, delete bewhiskered entries, and enliven the argument.

I have tried, instead, to preserve the flavor of his discontent while slightly enlarging the scope of the discussion. The Elements of Style does not pretend to survey the whole field.

It concentrates on fundamentals: the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated. The reader will soon discover that these rules and principles are in the form of sharp commands, Sergeant Strunk snapping orders to his platoon.

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. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Students learn to cut the dead-wood from “this is a subject that,” reducing it to “this subject,” a saving of three words. They learn to trim “used for fuel purposes” down to “used for fuel.” They learn that they are being chatterboxes when they say “the question as to whether” and that they should just say “whether” — a saving of four words out of a possible five.

The professor devotes a special paragraph to the vile expression the fact that, a phrase that causes him to quiver with revulsion. The expression, he says, should be “revised out of every sentence in which it occurs.” But a shadow of gloom seems to hang over the page, and you feel that he knows how hopeless his cause is. I suppose I have written the fact that a thousand times in the heat of composition, revised it out maybe five hundred times in the cool aftermath. To be batting only .500 this late in the season, to fail half the time to connect with this fat pitch, saddens me, for it seems a betrayal of the man who showed me how to swing at it and made the swinging seem worthwhile.

I treasure The Elements of Style for its sharp advice, but I treasure it even more for the audacity and self-confidence of its author.

I treasure The Elements of Style for its sharp advice, but I treasure it even more for the audacity（无畏） and self-confidence of its author. Will knew where he stood. He was so sure of where he stood, and made his position so clear and so plausible(可信的), that his peculiar stance has continued to invigorate me — and, I am sure, thousands of other ex-students — during the years that have intervened since our first encounter. He had a number of likes and dislikes that were almost as whimsical （古怪，反复无常） as the choice of a necktie, yet he made them seem utterly(完全) convincing. He disliked the word forceful and advised us to use forcible instead. He felt that the word clever was greatly overused: “It is best restricted to ingenuity displayed in small matters.” He despised the expression student body, which he termed gruesome, and made a special trip downtown to the Alumni News office one day to protest the expression and suggest that studentry be substituted — a coinage of his own, which he felt was similar to citizenry. I am told that the News editor was so charmed by the visit, if not by the word, that he ordered the student body buried, never to rise again. Studentry has taken its place. It’s not much of an improvement, but it does sound less cadaverous, and it made Will Strunk quite happy.