Although William Strunk got E. B. White in his clutches when White was but a naive undergraduate at Cornell (give them to me when they’re young and they’re mine forever, heh-heh-heh), and although White both understood and shared Strunk’s prejudice against loose writing and the loose thinking which prompts it, he admits, “I suppose I have written the fact that a thousand times in the heat of composition, revised it out maybe five hundred times in the cool aftermath. To be batting only .500 this late in the season, to fail half the time to connect with this fat pitch, saddens me…”
