Why I Keep Coming Back to Elements of Style for My Writing Students (It’s Free, Too)
On a Tuesday afternoon, I sat across from Marcus, a seventh grader who had just handed me a paragraph about his summer fishing trip. The words were all there, but something felt heavy. Every sentence seemed to drag. He had written “really big fish” twice, “very excited” once, and a long sentence that looped back on itself like a tangled fishing line. I asked him to read it aloud. He got to the third sentence and stopped.
“It doesn’t sound right,” he said.
“What would you change?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Maybe not use ‘really’ so much.”
That was the opening I needed. I walked over to the shelf where I keep a stack of battered yellow-covered books—Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. I handed one to Marcus. He looked at it like I’d offered him a brick.
“Trust me,” I said. “Just read page 13.”
He skimmed it. Page 13 has the famous rule: Omit needless words. Marcus read the example: “the fact that he had not succeeded” versus “he had not succeeded.” He looked up, puzzled.
“It’s like cutting the dead parts off a plant,” I said. “The sentence grows stronger when you remove what isn’t needed.”
That afternoon, he rewrote the paragraph. He cut “really big” and changed it to “a five-pound bass.” He deleted “very excited” and wrote “my hands shook.” He broke the long sentence into two short ones. When he read it aloud again, the rhythm was completely different. He didn’t say anything, but he nodded once, and I knew he felt it.
I’ve been teaching writing to middle schoolers for nine years, and I keep returning to Elements of Style—not because it’s trendy or new, but because it’s so small and direct that kids actually use it. The original version, written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, is in the public domain. You can download it for free, print it, or just pull it up on a phone. No app, no subscription, no login. That matters for parents who are tired of paying for another online learning tool that promises miracles.
What surprises me most is how quickly kids pick up the rules when they’re phrased the way Strunk wrote them. He doesn’t say “use the active voice to increase engagement.” He says, “Use the active voice: ‘I will always remember the first time I saw a mountain’ is better than ‘The first time I saw a mountain will always be remembered by me.’” That’s it. The example is clear. The contrast is obvious. Even a reluctant writer can see which version sounds like a real person talking.
I started using Elements of Style in my classroom about five years ago, after a particularly rough writing workshop. My students were producing paragraphs that looked like they had been run through a blender—long, vague, stuffed with words like “thing” and “stuff.” I tried graphic organizers. I tried sentence frames. I tried color-coding parts of speech. Everything worked for about a week, then the kids went back to their old habits.
Finally, I brought in a class set of Elements of Style—I had printed the free version and bound them with a stapler. I told the kids we were going to spend ten minutes a day on “writing rules that are older than your grandparents.” They groaned, but I put one on each desk anyway.
The first rule we focused on was number thirteen: Omit needless words. The kids latched onto it immediately because it felt like a game. I put a sentence on the board: “In my opinion, I think that the main character is very brave in the story.” Ben, a kid who usually spent most of class doodling, raised his hand.
“Couldn’t we just say ‘The main character is brave’? That’s nine words shorter.”
“Yes,” I said. “But where do we put the ‘in my opinion’ part?”
He thought for a second. “Nowhere. Because if I’m saying it, it’s already my opinion.”
That was the moment. Not a grand revelation, but a practical one. Ben understood that writing gets cleaner when you trust your reader. And for the rest of the year, I’d hear him mutter “needless word” whenever someone used “very” in a sentence. He wasn’t being rude—he was just policing his own drafts.
Here’s what I’ve learned about how to use Elements of Style with young writers, and it doesn’t require turning it into a formal program. You can do this at home, over breakfast, or in the car, with nothing but a printed page.
Start with one rule. Don’t hand your child the whole book and say “study this.” That will never work. Pick the rule that matches the biggest problem you see in their writing right now. If they write long, rambling sentences, focus on omit needless words. If their paragraphs are full of passive constructions, work on use the active voice. If they keep switching between “he” and “you” in the same story, look at be clear.
Use the examples, not your own lecture. The beauty of Strunk’s book is that every rule comes with a pair of before-and-after sentences. Read both aloud and ask your child which one sounds better. They’ll almost always pick the clearer version. Then just say, “Okay, that’s the one we’ll try today.”
Make it physical. I’ve had kids highlight every “very” in a paragraph, then count the highlights. One girl got to twelve and burst out laughing. Then she circled them and wrote “DELETE” over the whole line. That’s more memorable than any grammar worksheet.
Connect it to texting. Teens get defensive about formal writing, but they understand that a text message with useless filler is annoying. Show them a sentence like “I am literally dying of hunger right now, honestly” and ask how they’d shorten it. They’ll say “I’m starving.” That’s the same principle. Elements of Style isn’t about sounding stiff—it’s about saying what you mean.
One thing I still struggle with is that the book feels dated in places. Strunk’s examples mention words like “men” a lot, and his tone can be a little rigid. I always tell my students that we’re using the rules, not the attitude. We skip the gendered language and focus on the clarity. The core ideas hold up.
Last week, Marcus found me before school. He had printed his own copy of Elements of Style from the internet and folded it into his backpack. He said his older sister was writing an essay for high school and he showed her the omit needless words rule. She got a B plus, and he was annoyingly proud about it. Then he asked, “When do I learn the next rule?”
We haven’t gotten to commas yet. But knowing Marcus, he’ll figure those out on his own, one sentence at a time. I’m just glad he has something to hold onto that doesn’t cost anything but a few minutes of attention.
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