William Strunk Jr. was an American professor of English at Cornell University and the original author of The Elements of Style. Written for his students and first privately circulated in the late 1910s, Strunk's compact manual set out a forceful approach to English prose based on clarity, brevity, grammatical control, and disciplined revision. His most famous instruction, "omit needless words," became one of the best-known pieces of writing advice in American education.Strunk's influence reached far beyond his classroom after his former student E. B. White helped bring the manual to a much wider public in the 1959 Strunk and White edition. The book's authority has been debated, praised, criticized, imitated, and assigned for decades, but its place in the history of American writing instruction is secure. Strunk remains associated with the ideal of clean, direct prose: writing that avoids clutter, chooses concrete language, and treats style as a matter of order, emphasis, and respect for the reader.