THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

by WILLIAM STRUNK, Jr.

Overview

This book aims to give in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style. It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention (in Chapters II and III) on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated. In accordance with this plan it lays down three rules for the use of the comma, instead of a score or more, and one for the use of the semicolon, in the belief that these four rules provide for all the internal punctuation that is required by nineteen sentences out of twenty. Similarly, it gives in CHAPTER III only those principles of the paragraph and the sentence which are of the widest application. The book thus covers only a small portion of the field of English style. The experience of its writer has been that once past the essentials, students profit most by individual instruction based on the problems of their own work, and that each instructor has his own body of theory, which he may prefer to that offered by any textbook.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940162075486
Publisher:	Steinbeck Publishers
Publication date:	06/03/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

William Strunk Jr. (July 1, 1869 – September 26, 1946) was an American professor of English at Cornell University and author of The Elements of Style (1918). After revision and enlargement by his former student E. B. White, it became a highly influential guide to English usage during the late 20th century, commonly called Strunk & White. Strunk was born and reared in Cincinnati, Ohio, the eldest of the four surviving children of William and Ella Garretson Strunk. He earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Cincinnati in 1890 and a PhD at Cornell University in 1896. He spent the academic year 1898–99 at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, where he studied morphology and philology. In 1900, Strunk married Olivia Emilie Locke, with whom he had three children, including the noted musicologist Oliver Strunk. Strunk wrote the first edition of The Elements of Style for the use of his students and had it privately printed in 1918. A revised edition titled The Elements and Practice of Composition, with Edward A. Tenney as coauthor, was printed in 1935. The only other book Strunk wrote was English Metres, published locally in 1922.