The Fighting Style: 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, Pearson 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 through 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