This was a talk given at the Literacy Studies Forum session at MLA 2016. I argue that The Elements of Style by Strunk and White comes out of a history connecting it to the nineteenth century “conversation handbook” (Connors) and other cultural guides to middlebrow identity formation, including The Book-Of-The-Month Club. The Elements of Style is a guide to a genteel language performance rooted in the racialized, gendered and classed discourses of these middlebrow cultural objects.