ABSTRACT
Strunk and White are also short on history (they’re proposing changes in future conduct, after all), and they are not much inclined to justify the commands they freely give. The cunning of history has produced stories no less fanciful than this, and once we recognize the intentional design of grammars and styles, the discovery that those intentions are expressive is no more startling than finding that other human gestures are; the surprise, in fact, would be the other way. For one thing, it is too brief to serve as a system of rhetoric (eighty-five short pages), and Strunk and White also treat quite casually the order in which questions of style and grammar (the two are constantly mixed together) are taken up. For Strunk and White, the terms of this opposition are characters in a drama, and there is thus no need to explain or to rationalize them.
