SOURCE: "William Strunk," in Essays of E. B. White, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977, pp. 256-61.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1957, White offers personal recollections of Strunk and praises The Elements of Style for its brevity and significance.

AUTHOR'S NOTE. Soon after this piece about Professor Strunk appeared in The New Yorker, a publisher asked me to revise and amplify The Elements of Style in order that it might be reissued. I agreed to do this and did it, but the job, which should have taken about a month's time, took me a year. I discovered that for all my fine talk I was no match for the parts of speech—was, in fact, over my depth and in trouble. Not only that, I felt uneasy at posing as an expert on rhetoric, when the truth is I write by ear, always with difficulty and seldom...