so what's a "needful word," anyway?

Strunk & White's most famous and most quoted piece of advice is: Omit needless words. White, in his introduction, describes Strunk's delivery of it:

When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and, in a husky, conspiratorial voice, said, "Rule Seventeen: Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!"
(xiii)

Notice the repetition (a characteristic, White says, of Strunk's oratorical style.) Consider the tension that repetition creates.

Many people, especially those getting it second-hand, assume this maxim is intended to privilege conciseness and brevity. But it isn't. Listen:

Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish in the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable. The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is himself he is approaching, no other.
(69)

In defining style--or trying to, since it's an imponderable, like the Zen koans Bear is talking about this morning--they quote both Faulkner and Hemingway:

He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in its well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body's pleasure instead of the body thrall to time's headlong course.

Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besideds there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited.

Anyone acquainted with Faulkner and Hemingway [say Mssrs. Strunk & White] will have recognized them in these passages and perceived which was which. How different are their languours!
68)

Their purpose is not to praise Hemingway at the expense of Faulkner, or to castigate either one of them for using "needless words," but to point out the individuality of their styles.

So Omit needless words isn't trying to make you write like Hemingway. Thank god. It's trying to make you think about the words you use. Encouraging you to get rid of the scaffolding.

Now, Strunk & White have strong and definite opinions about what the scaffolding consists of. You don't have to agree with them. (That's the big secret: you don't have to agree with anyone who gives you writing advice. You have to listen to it, evaluate it, and decide if it's true for you or not. It may not be. That's okay.) They advocate a plain and unadorned writing style--and since their advice is intended for beginning writers and college students, I think that's sensible. And Strunk's style is peremptory and authoritarian (a style White says he chose not to meddle with). Which makes it a little harder to plant your feet and say, No, when he tells you how you ought to write.

But do it anyway. Don't let yourself be bullied.

Omit needless words is a dictum, a fiat. Rule Seventeen: Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words! is a koan. The koan is more useful in the long run.

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WORKS CITED
Strunk, William, Jr., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 3rd Edition. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1979.