American wit Dorothy Parker said, regarding the book:If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style.

[citation needed] Strunk and editor Edward A. Tenney later revised it for publication as The Elements and Practice of Composition (1935).

White had studied writing under Strunk in 1919 but had since forgotten "the little book" that he described as a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English."

[10] Strunk concentrated on the cultivation of good writing and composition; the original 1918 edition exhorted writers to "omit needless words," use the active voice, and employ parallelism appropriately.

[11] The 1959 edition features White's expansions of preliminary sections, the "Introduction" essay (derived from his magazine story about Strunk), and the concluding chapter, "An Approach to Style," a broader, prescriptive guide to writing in English.

The final reminder, the 21st, "Prefer the standard to the offbeat," is thematically integral to the subject of The Elements of Style, yet it does stand as a discrete essay about writing lucid prose.

The fourth edition of The Elements of Style (1999) omits Strunk's advice about masculine pronouns: "unless the antecedent is or must be feminine".

[14] In its place, the book reads, "many writers find the use of the generic he or his to rename indefinite antecedents limiting or offensive."

He or She", in Chapter IV: Misused Words and Expressions, advises the writer to avoid an "unintentional emphasis on the masculine".

Criticism of Strunk & White has largely focused on claims that it has a prescriptivist nature, or that it has become a general anachronism in the face of modern English usage.

Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write however or than me or was or which, but can't tell you why.

[22]Pullum has argued, for example, that the authors misunderstood what constitutes the passive voice, and he criticized their proscription of established and unproblematic English usages, such as the split infinitive and the use of which in a restrictive relative clause.