PERSON
William Strunk Jr.
The Cornell professor who handed forty-three pages of prose rules to students in 1918 and, in doing so, produced a
theory of mind disguised as a style guide—whose principles have never mattered more than now, when AI can follow every rule he codified while being incapable of possessing the judgment those rules were designed to form.
William Strunk Jr. privately printed a forty-three-page pamphlet for use in his English 8 course at Cornell in 1918 and expected nothing more than the semester from it. The pamphlet became, through E.B. White’s 1959 revival, the most widely read guide to English prose composition of the twentieth century. Its fame rested on the directness of its central instruction: omit needless words. Use the active voice. Prefer the specific to the general. Put statements in positive form. These were not arbitrary preferences; they were a theory of the mind that produces good sentences—a mind that distinguishes the essential from the inessential, assigns responsibility to agents rather than dissolving it in grammatical abstraction, possesses specific knowledge of the world and insists on saying so. The principles worked, and worked at scale, because most bad writing is bad in the same
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