Once upon a time, in 1918, William Strunk Jr. put together The Elements of Style, a book containing a few simple rules to help people with their writing. 40 years later, beloved author E. B. White expanded and revised the book; the first edition that became known colloquially as "Strunk & White" was published in 1959. This book has helped ruin many people's ability to understand grammar.
There is good advice in the book, but it is confounded and commingled with so much that is confusing—or incorrect—that it has left many students and writers unable to identify things like the passive voice or a dangling participle. In his essay 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice, linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum says:
It's sad. 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. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style.
Here are a few harms this book has done to writing.
The Most Important Rules
The first chapter of the book, with the lofty title "Elementary Rules of Usage," provides the eleven basic grammatical laws Strunk & White would like you to know. Imagine writing a book like this—imagine the opportunity to choose the Eleven Commandments of proper language. What would you choose for the first rule? Strunk & White chose: Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's. Chapter one, page one, first Elementary Rule of Usage: apostrophe-s.1
The next rule is about the Oxford comma. I'm a fan of the Oxford comma myself, but I'm not sure it would go in my top eleven. The next rule is another comma thing, then rule 4 is also about commas, and rule 5 is about a way to not use commas. Rule 6 is about not using a period in place of a comma. Rules 7 and 8 are about how to use a colon and a dash, respectively, and then we come to rule 9: The number of the subject determines the number of the verb.
Rule 10 is about using the proper pronoun case. Rule 11 is about dangling participles.
Subject-verb agreement, arguably the most important of the basics, is buried in ninth place among a bunch of rules about punctuation. Strunk & White seem to consider apostrophe-s the most important rule. Rules 10 and 11 are interesting, and it's a shame all those commas have shoved them to a place of obscurity.
The Passive Voice
It is in the second chapter, "Principles of Composition," where Strunk & White really show their grammatical "chops." Many of the "principles" are clumsy but otherwise harmless. But when we come to rule 14, concerning the active voice, it is clear that neither Strunk nor White knows what the passive voice is.
Remember this example:
There were a great number of leaves lying on the ground.
Constructions like there is and there are are actually one form of an expletive. An expletive doesn't add meaning to a sentence, but acts as filler for shifting emphasis. Strunk and White are correct that these constructions can be wasteful, but incorrect when they identify them as examples of the passive voice.
A Product of its Time
You will have already guessed that Strunk & White are against the singular they. Grammarians of the 19th and early 20th century had firmly declared he to be the default singular pronoun.
It might surprise you that Strunk & White considered people incorrect when referring to a group of individuals:
The word people is best not used with words of number, in place of persons. If of six people five went away, how many people would be left? Answer: one people.
This seems overly fussy; although people and person have different etymologies, the use of people to mean a specific group of persons dates back to the 1300s. Does anyone use persons as a plural for people, outside of specific settings such as the legal, transportation, or passenger elevator industries?
Finally, the latest edition in my possession—published in 2000—still contains this timely advice:
If a manuscript is to be submitted for publication, leave plenty of space at the top of page 1. The editor will need this space to write directions to the compositor.
Next time I dust off my typewriter and send pages to my editor, I will be considerate of my compositor.
Where Do We Go from Here?
If I could, I would break Strunk & White's stranglehold on grammatical education. There are dozens of better books, from Thomas Lounsbury's The Standard of Usage in English to Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing by Mignon Fogarty. If you need to know when to use the passive voice or what a dangling participle is, the Internet is rife with great grammar guides.2 I can't remove The Elements of Style from the canon, so in the meantime I'll do what I can to provide an alternative.
And as we know, Apostrophes Aren't for Possessives.
See what I did there?