E.b. White

October 3, 1985

E.B. White, who died Tuesday at the age of 86, was revered by sophisticates for his nearly 60 years of work for The New Yorker and loved by children for such bittersweet tales as Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. But Mr. White may be remembered longest for a slim volume called The Elements of Style, an expansion of an even slimmer textbook written by his English professor at Cornell University, William Strunk Jr.

The excerpts that follow are from ''An Approach to Style,'' a chapter Mr. White added to the Strunk text. ''Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.''

''Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.''

''Adverbs are easy to build. Take an adjective or a participle, add -ly, and behold! you have an adverb. But you'd probably be better off without it. ''Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able. Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words.''

The ''E.B.'' in Mr. White's name stood for ''Elwyn Brooks.'' As he once explained, with a notable lack of twenty-dollar words, ''I never liked Elwyn. My mother hung it on me because she'd run out of names. I was her sixth child.'' That's E.B. White.

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