SOURCE: A review of The Elements of Style, in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. LIX, No. 1, Winter, 1960, pp. 128-29.

In the following essay, Baum provides a favorable assessment of White's revision of The Elements of Style.

It is a melancholy thought, sometimes, that the language we are born to, which we practice daily—speaking, reading, and occasionally writing—should be so vexatious when we are asked to use it properly. Custom never seems to mitigate its infinite complexity. In the home and in secondary schools something is done about it; but there the Law of Hydrostatics is operant. In the colleges Freshman English is a perpetual trial, when the poor student is faced with all his accumulated handicaps and the poor instructor, in the rôle of Sisyphus, resorts to all the known devices to undo the evils of quotidian habit and overcome the influences of newspaper and...