Reading the Unabomber's Strunk and White
William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White's The Elements of Style turns fifty this year. To mark the occasion, cheap jewelry Longman has issued a Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, prefaced by blurbs from novelists (Ann Patchett, Richard Ford, Francine Prose), celebrities (Ben Affleck), academics (Henry Louis Gates Jr.), and editors (David Remnick) testifying to the manual's impact. What there are not, however, are any blurbs from composition scholars. This is at once a sad comment on the visibility of our field in public discussions of what counts as good writing, and a statement of the field's general disregard for Strunk and White and the style they have so successfully promulgated. Aside from the occasional nod to acknowledge, and if possible appropriate Strunk and White's singular position at the top of the ever-proliferating pile of writing manuals ("The Strunk and White of academic writing" is the praise Richard Bullock gives Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say/I Say), composition scholars and The Elements of Style have been in something like a fifty-year standoff.
This standoff was the second thing to go cheap key rings my mind when in 2008 I received an email from Pearson asking me if I was a "Strunk and Whiter." The e-ad invited me to celebrate "50 years of style" by adopting Strunk and White with any Pearson English text for a fifty percent cut on the cover price-a great deal for my students. In return, I would get the special hardcover fiftieth anniversary edition. No, my first thought was not about who in our field might take that offer, but about Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. However tempting Pearson's offer, the edition of Strunk and White that tells us the most about the manual's legacy, and is also likely to be sold in the coming years, is the one discovered in the Unabomber's mildewing cabin amidst the many other do-it-yourself manuals on his bookshelf (for example, Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, Know Your Rights, Psychology of Women). The price of this volume is yet to be determined. It, along with the rest of the property the FBI seized in its 1996 raid on Kaczynski's home, will likely go to the highest bidder in a government-sponsored murderabilia auction on the Internet, the proceeds to benefit the Unabomber's victims, to whom he owes nearly fifteen million dollars in restitution. Several of Kaczynski's victims have protested this pending sale, most notably Yale computer science professor and contributing editor to the Weekly Standard, David cheap money clips, according to whom I am a sicky for wondering how The Elements of Style helped the Unabomber write his manifesto. Gelernter argued in a letter to the court that as the auction would only feed Kaczynski's insatiable desire for fame, his possessions should be either destroyed or locked up for one hundred years, and then made available at no charge to "scholars of depravity" (Letter 2).
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