In her essay “Strunk and White Set the Standard,” Laura Lisabeth discusses the limitations of The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White. The Elements of Style is a popular reference book on Standard English that can trace its roots back to 1918. However, Strunk and White’s style of English “marginalizes the identities, knowledge, and being of many people who come from other literacy practices” (Lisabeth 118). An alternative to Strunk and White’s style of English is the idea of “understanding Standard Academic English as a historically formed, culturally specific language among many other languages (Lisabeth 119). Only by first understanding there is a problem, can we begin to address it.

“Everyday English Book” by Ivan Shilov. Unsplash.

While The Elements of Style has remained popular for decades, it is not without its detractors. Even in 1959 “… The Elements of Style was greeted with criticism by the field of college composition for being vague and misleading about the complex act of learning to compose academic writing” (Lisabeth 117). Professor Lisabeth herself excoriates “the kind of writing Strunk and White put forth as good writing” as a discourse that limits and excludes (Lisabeth 118). Feagin discusses Shirley Heath’s Ways with Words epilogue where changes in the schools which have eliminated the possibility of creative teaching have discouraged teachers to the point that many are leaving the field (Feagin 491). These criticisms suggest there is room for improvement and flexibility in Standard Academic English.

In understanding Standard Academic English as one culturally specific language among many other languages, then its criticisms, what is a better system? “Sociolinguists point to the ways English is already operating as a flexible medium, repurposed by American users to include, for example, Black and Latinx variations and the language and punctuation of social media, all of which expand the expressiveness of English and make it relevant to more users” (Lisabeth 118-119). A better system encourages flexibility and creativity to fully bring out the identities and knowledge of the people using the language. This system would not be limited to a personal capacity; “access to such uses of language can help many emerging academic writers to develop more competence and to perform better in school as they capitalize on existing meaningful ways of expressing knowledge” (Lisabeth 119). Therefore, students can also benefit professionally. Feagin, through Heath, discusses the value of this better system in helping teachers “deal with non-mainstream children from Roadville- and Trackton-like communities who were having trouble in school and gives examples of projects which worked in that particular population” (Feagin 491). The better system did not marginalize or trivialize the identities and cultures of the non-mainstream children, but rather included them and was enhanced by their uniqueness.

“White Printer Paper” by Toa Heftiba. Unsplash.

In conclusion, while The Elements of Style by Strunk and White has been widely taught for many decades, it is not the only possible style of Standard Academic English nor the best. By recognizing English as a constantly evolving language rather than something rigid and exclusive, we can understand there are better systems. Feagin corroborates this by saying “we need such an extended work [A Way with Words] to show us how ignorant we are of the people around us” (Feagin 491). Then, comes the important steps of bringing that awareness and teaching those better, inclusive systems to the next generation of students. After all, they will be the ones to inherit the English language and enhance it in ways we could never imagine. As Professor Lisabeth states “these networked ways of writing, along with social-media inspired ways of thinking about punctuation, continue to explode definitions for what constitutes meaningful language and educated English” (Lisabeth 119).

Works Cited

1.) Lisabeth, Laura. “Strunk and White Set the Standard.” Digital Publishing Institute, 2017. Bad Ideas About Writing E-book, https://textbooks.lib.wvu.edu/badideas/badideasaboutwriting-book.pdf#page=128.

2.) Feagin, Crawford. Language, vol. 61, no. 2, Linguistic Society of America, 1985, pp. 489–93, https://doi.org/10.2307/414163.