How The Elements of Style—A Free Classic—Helped My Fifth Grader Write Clearer Sentences
Last Tuesday, my son Leo was hunched over his desk at 9:15 PM, trying to finish an essay on the California Gold Rush. His backpack was still on the floor, and the dog had been barking at nothing for the better part of an hour. I leaned over his shoulder to see what he had.
“The forty-niners were people who came to California in 1849 and they were looking for gold and they came by boat or wagon and many of them ended up getting sick.”
He was proud of it. It had real facts, a capital letter at the start, and a period at the end. Hard to argue with that.
But it had a problem, and I could not quite name it until I remembered a small book with an orange cover that I had not touched since college: The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White.
I have been thinking about that book a lot lately because Leo’s school writing assignments keep getting longer while his sentences are not getting any better. His teacher hands out checklist after checklist—hook, topic sentence, three details, concluding sentence, transition words. The classroom formula is fine in theory, but it gives kids the impression that good writing means lots of words arranged in a certain order. So Leo writes eleven-word sentences when four would do just fine.
The good news: The Elements of Style is now free and easy to find online. Originally published in 1918, it went into the public domain long ago. You can pull up the original version, or White’s later edition, on any number of sites without an account or a payment. A couple of years ago, I would have had to dig through boxes for my old paperback. Instead I opened my laptop.
I remember the first time I read Strunk as a freshman, and I remember thinking the rules seemed obvious and even a bit strict. But watching a fifth grader write about gold miners, the old advice suddenly made a lot of sense.
“Rule 13,” I told Leo. “Omit needless words.”
He looked at me the way a kid looks at a parent who just started reciting ancient law. So I brought the laptop over and let him read it for himself. Strunk’s original words are blunt: “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
We read his sentence out loud, both of us, at the same time. He got through “The forty-niners were people who came to California in 1849″ and laughed. He could hear the repetition—”came” and “they” and “and” all over again.
We spent the next ten minutes finding the useless words. “Were people who came” became “came.” The second “and they” got crossed out. We ended up with: “In 1849, forty-niners came to California by boat or wagon, looking for gold.”
Twenty-one words became thirteen. He read it back and said it sounded faster. I agreed.
That moment is not going to fix the way he writes about the American Revolution next month. But something about seeing one of his own sentences on a page, stripped of the filler, made him curious. He has always been a decent writer, the kind of kid who gets a B-plus on most assignments. The problem was never understanding. It was volume. He thought teachers wanted quantity. Omit needless words told him that a short sentence could actually be a better sentence.
Over the next few days, I printed out three pages from the free online edition and taped them beside his desk: the rule about omitting needless words, the rule about using active voice, and the passage about preferring concrete language over the vague and general sort.
The active voice rule has been the trickier one to explain. Strunk and White say the subject of a sentence should perform an action, not have an action performed upon it. Leo’s reports are full of sentences like “The gold was found by people from all over the world.” He wrote it that way because it feels academic, which is what school has taught him to do. When I asked him who found the gold, he said, “People.” So I asked him why people were not the subject. He thought about that for a while and came up with: “People from all over the world found gold.” Fewer words, and someone is actually doing the finding.
The concrete language rule was easier to apply because it turned writing into a small game. Leo wrote a paragraph describing a mining camp, and the first draft used words like “hard,” “dark,” and “bad.” He has been told before to use more descriptive language, and I have used that phrase myself without giving him much of a method. Strunk gives a method. Instead of saying that the camp was hard, he had to mention something specific he could see or feel—rough boards, cold water in the morning, the sound of pickaxes against rock. He replaced the adjectives with details from the Gold Rush books we have around the house, and the paragraph got shorter while reading more real.
I should mention that some of The Elements of Style does not translate to elementary school. White’s additions to the book get fussy about “he or she” and insist on “shall” in places where nobody my son knows speaks that way. The grammar rules are aimed at adults, and some of them feel stiff to a generation raised on text messages. We skip over the parts that do not apply. The point is not to hand a kid a hundred-year-old rulebook and say “read this.” The point is to let a few good principles trickle in.
There was one unexpected payoff. Middle school students are not the only people who benefit from this. Leo’s social media captions and texts started changing too. I have watched him type a message to a friend that said “omg that was such a long game.” Then he deleted “such a” after giving me a quick look. The same lesson shows up in a different place and sticks slightly deeper.
I have also started to avoid needless words in my own instructions. Yesterday I told my wife, “It’s getting to be about the time when we should probably take the dog to the vet.” That was a sentence full of padding. I said it again, shorter, and Leo rolled his eyes at me from the kitchen table. The lesson works in both directions.
Here is what remains uncertain. School writing still encourages a kind of grandiosity. The checklist approach is not going away, and I am not sure it should. Leo needs to know how to write a topic sentence and organize a paragraph, because that is what his teachers grade and what the state exams are built on. But the old book gives him permission to cut. It gives him something I could not easily find in the classroom materials: a reason to value each word.
I do not know whether this will turn him into a good writer in five years. Writing instruction in school will keep pushing toward formulas, and some of those formulas will contradict Strunk and White in fairly direct ways. But a few pages of a free old book are sitting on his desk now, and last night he found two needless words in a paragraph on his own before I even got a look. That is not a perfect victory, but it is a real one.
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