In ninth-grade English, I was introduced to The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. Needless to say, this was a while ago, and I’ve both read and written a few things since then. Nonetheless, just weeks ago I managed to turn in a poem to my writing workshop containing the line, “He lifts the ringing culprit in his fingers.” My instructor looked at me askance before asking why I hadn’t simply written, “He answers his cell phone.” Oh….Yeah. Clearly for some of us, the reissue of Elements, newly illustrated by Maira Kalman, has come not a moment too soon. Kalman’s strange, gorgeous paintings are a treat that will charm readers into rediscovering a book that is as fresh, relevant, and funny as it was back in its first edition.

The Elements of Style has always been the original in the way of tart, pithy guides to writing and grammar. Long before Lynne Truss delighted readers with her curmudgeonry in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, there was old Strunk— railing against words like “beauteous” and “utilize,” offering such sage advice like “Avoid fancy words.” By adding her quirky pictures, Kalman is both paying homage to a classic and inviting new readers to discover it. Elements is now a two-fold experience; visual and literary.

One has to imagine Kalman as one of those geniuses who lose themselves every morning over their breakfast cereal, constantly struck by ideas—“I know, I’ll paint about sentence structure! Illustrate a grammar book!”—that would sound ridiculous to the rest of us, and yet turn out to be brilliant. In addition to devising this new illustrated Elements, Kalman also commissioned Nico Muhly to compose an opera. Performed recently at the New York Public Library, it was by all accounts crazy yet wonderful, complete with Kalman’s friend Isaac Mizrahi playing an eggbeater. We non-geniuses, on the other hand, have probably not considered the idea of singing about words and sentences since the last time we watched Sesame Street.

Kalman’s ideas work. The new book is a slim, appealing red volume. Gone is the fusty plainness of the ninth-grade classroom. This book is classy. The inside front cover says “hello,” and the inside back cover says “goodbye” in tiny cursive script like elegant hostess cards. Almost every other page is illustrated, and the illustrations range from Kalman’s interpretation of “overly, muchly, thusly” (a top-heavy ship-on-land structure) to “Chloe smells good, as a baby should” (the huge gurgling face of red-headed baby Chloe.) All the pictures are bright, and many of them demonstrate a deliberate absence of compositional depth that seems to be one of Kalman’s trademarks. As such, the odd tangle of characters she paints in an illustration like hers for “None of us is perfect,” seem ready to tumble on top of each other or out of the page. Some of the paintings like “What a wonderful show!” to me resemble the flurried, brilliant compositions of the painter discovered in the lunatic asylum. Kalman’s bright oddness, her weird lines of perspective, have something off-kilter to them, something more often found in outsider-art.

If Kalman had illustrated the phonebook instead, it would be worth reading just for the sake of seeing her pictures. In this case, however, in addition to Kalman’s illustrations, one has the barbed imperatives of good old Strunk and White to look forward to, like :

Nauseous. Nauseated. The first means “sickening to contemplate”; the second means “sick at the stomach.” Do not, therefore, say, “I feel nauseous,” unless you are sure you have that effect on others.

and:

Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. Think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.

It is both his grumpiness in misuse and the genuine joy in clarity that make Strunk a wonderful guide. Strunk saw bad writing as insidious and disruptive, an ever-present trap into which it was easy to slip. Similarly, his view of the precarious position of the reader is observed by White in his introduction:

All through The Elements of Style one finds evidences of the author’s deep sympathy for the reader. Will [Strunk] felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get the reader up on dry ground, or at least throw a rope.

All in all, the illustrated Elements of Style is well worth the reader’s time—a sturdy rope with which to rescue anyone stranded in a morass of unclear language, whether your own or someone else’s. Kalman’s bright, dreamy images are persuasive in their own right too. And even if you’ve never mixed up “which” and “that,” misplaced a single comma, nor composed an overwrought line, you should still pick up what remains one of the funniest books on writing ever written.