I did something dumb.  I sent Under Shōko’s Bed off for editing without going through it to see how well it matched all of the prescriptions and proscriptions in William Strunk Jr.’s The Elements of Style.  I’ve read it before.  Short as it is (only 50 pages), it doesn’t take long, and I thought I had learned its lessons.  I decided to reread it for this blog and only then found that I did not have a copy.  I got one posthaste (it’s free on the Internet) and oh, the problems I discovered!  I had not learned its lessons at all!

Here are two examples from Strunk’s section on “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused” that I seem to have been using incorrectly forever: 

All right.  Idiomatic in familiar speech as a detached phrase in the sense, ‘Agreed,’ or ‘Go ahead.’  In other uses better avoided.  Always written as two words.

Compare.  To compare to is to point out or imply resemblances, between objects regarded as essentially of different order; to compare with is mainly to point out differences, between objects regarded as essentially of the same order.  Thus life has been compared to a pilgrimage, to a drama, to a battle; Congress may be compared with the British Parliament.  Paris has been compared to ancient Athens; it may be compared with modern London.

At the same time, I recognize that Strunk’s work is now 100 years old.  English usage has changed in that time.  For example, Strunk states that “would” is commonly misused:

Would. A conditional statement in the first person requires should, not would.  I should not have succeeded without his help.  The equivalent of shall in indirect quotation after a verb in the past tense is should, not would.  He predicted that before long we should have a great surprise.

This is based on the old usage for showing futurity of “shall/should” for first-person pronouns and “will/would” for second- and third-person pronouns.  The problem is that Americans don’t speak that way today.  “Should” in common usage has lost its simple futurity meaning and its meaning of obligation now predominates, which changes the meaning of Strunk’s example, “I should not have succeeded without his help.”  Strunk meant, “I succeeded because I had his help,” while today the sentence means, “I ought to have failed without his help.”  The two meanings are related but they are not the same, and I worry that using the classical rule could lead to misunderstanding for today’s readers.

All of this leaves me hoping that my editor can channel Strunk, whose text still shines in both clarity and brevity, but waiting with great curiosity to see if some of the more archaic rules have been relaxed and my “mistakes” have made it through the editing process unscathed.  In the end, of course, it is up to me to decide how closely to follow Strunk.  My plan is to do what I should have done before the edit, go through Strunk page by page and search my text for each of the problems he explains.  In the process, I hope I shall internalize his relevant advice, and I hope that I can lean on my editor for help in deciding which bits of advice are no longer relevant.