Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Elements of Style: Writing Strategies with Grammar
    The Elements of Style: Writing Strategies with Grammar
    The Elements of Style: Writing Strategies with Grammar
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    The Elements of Style: Writing Strategies with Grammar

    By William Strunk Jr and GP Editors

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The Elements of Style is widely considered America’s most beloved grammar book. This is the most trusted writer's guide to English—this is the book that generations of writers have relied upon for timeless advice on grammar, diction, syntax, sentence construction, and other writing essentials.
    Strunk b

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGENERAL PRESS
    Release dateFeb 11, 2019
    ISBN9789388760324
    The Elements of Style: Writing Strategies with Grammar
    Author

    William Strunk Jr

    William Strunk, Jr. (1869-1946) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the eldest of William and Ella Garretson Strunk's four children. Strunk excelled in school, eventually earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Cincinnati and a PhD at Cornell University. He then attended the Sorbonne and the Collège de France from 1898-99 where he studied morphology and philology. Strunk began his academic career teaching mathematics at Rose Polytechnical Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana from 1890-91, then returned to Cornell and taught English there for 46 years. In 1922 he published English Metres, a study of poetic metrical form, and began writing he critical editions of various classical works. Strunk joined a literary group called the Manuscript Club which held Saturday night meetings to discuss writing and literature. There, Strunk met and became friends with a young aspiring writer, Elwyn Brooks ("E.B.") White. In 1918, Strunk published The Elements of Style, but originally only intended it to be used by his Cornell students, who nicknamed it "the little book." In 1935, Strunk and Edward A. Tenney revised the manuscript and re-published the guide for wider distribution as The Elements and Practice of Composition. Years later, after Strunk had passed away, E.B. White - now working at the New Yorker - praised the "little book" in his column, calling it a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English." As a result of the new attention White's praise generated for Strunk's manuscript, Macmillan and Company commissioned White to revise the 1935 edition for republication. The resulting book became an immediate hit. Since The Elements of Style (now credited to both Strunk and White) was originally republished in 1959, sales of the book - and subsequent editions - has exceeded ten million copies and the book is often referred to simply as "Strunk and White." William Strunk retired from Cornell in 1937 and in 1945 he suffered a mental breakdown, diagnosed as "senile psychosis." He died less than a year later at the Hudson River Psychiatric Institute in Poughkeepsie, New York.

    Read more from William Strunk Jr

    Related to The Elements of Style

    Related ebooks

    Composition & Creative Writing For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      On Semicolons And The Rules Of Writing

      Jul 10, 2018

      1. Kurt Vonnegut’s caution against the use of semicolons is one of the most famous and canonical pieces of writing advice, an admonition that has become, so to speak, one of The Rules. More on these rules later, but first the infamous quote in questi

      6 min read

    • Article

      Poetic Asides

      Aug 7, 2023

      In my last column, I focused on how to create and play with structure in poetry—and shared the evolution of a poem that changed structure from one collection to the next. However, structure is only one piece in the puzzle of putting together a poem.

      2 min read

    • Article

      The State Of It

      Sep 12, 2021

      The State Of It
      6 min read

    • Article

      Graham Greene’s ‘Entertainments’ and The Problem of Writing from Life

      Apr 11, 2018

      For Greene, the moralizing literary artist, the therapy of commercial fiction itself becomes an object of his moralizing.  The post Graham Greene’s ‘Entertainments’ and The Problem of Writing from Life appeared first on The Million

      13 min read

    • Article

      Life Goals

      Apr 13, 2022

      Life Goals
      11 min read

    • Article

      Everything I Don’t Know About Swords: On Teaching Creative Writing

      Mar 19, 2018

      1. One evening in grad school, half-drunk and Googling my own name, I found a blog run by one of my fiction students. I shouldn’t have read it, but of course I read it. “I already hate this class,” she wrote. “My teacher is a stuck-up snob who won’t

      7 min read

    • Article

      Opportunity Costs

      Feb 7, 2020

      Opportunity Costs
      10 min read

    • Article

      Spellbound

      Oct 18, 2021

      Reading has always seemed, to me, to be the purest form of magic. Collections of letters organized in ways our minds recognize to be words, arranged in sentences that somehow, by the amazing workings of our brains, transport us to places real or imag

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Importance of Genre

      Feb 13, 2023

      I’ve always had somewhat of a genre problem, and I don’t think I’m alone. Not every book fits tidily into one category. Many novels have elements of various genres. I wanted my book to be unique, and for this reason, I rejected the “know your genre”

      4 min read

    • Article

      Flesh On The Bones

      Jun 1, 2023

      I’m an under-writer. I tend to trace a story out using the faintest of lines, leaving half of the page blank, leaving half of the words in my head. Then I have to go back and shore up what I’ve written, making sure I’m not expecting a great feat of t

      6 min read

    • Article

      Bookish

      May 21, 2019

      There’s no one right way to live a writing life (unless, of course, you never write a word). But how does one start being a writer? Who’s allowed to call themselves a “writer,” anyway? And beyond grammar and syntax, what does a person need to know be

      1 min read

    • Article

      Polishing Your Prose

      Oct 30, 2019

      So you wrote your article or essay and feel ready to click send. Not so fast. Once you have written a piece, it’s important to edit yourself and revise. As an editor, writing coach, and adjunct writing professor at New York University, I teach my stu

      4 min read

    • Article

      How to Write the Perfect Five-Paragraph Essay

      Sep 4, 2019

      The classic comp exercise is often thought of as facile—the opposite of mature, fully realized work. That's exactly why Rion Amilcar Scott took it on. The post How to Write the Perfect Five-Paragraph Essay appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Sep 2, 2021

      I’ve been writing novels for more than ten years but only recently decided to become a member of the Society of Authors and wish I had spent a few of the pounds it has cost blundering about getting books published on POD for my friends (and hopefully

      6 min read

    • Article

      Wrath Of The Gods

      Oct 18, 2021

      The Poppy War trilogy, Rebecca F. Kuang’s debut fantasy series, creates a new magic system with very old roots. the Chinese-American writer borrows Taoist and Chinese folk themes to build her own pantheon of gods, then draws on the ancient tradition

      6 min read

    • Article

      Better writing NOW

      May 6, 2021

      Better writing NOW
      5 min read

    • Article

      Keeping Time With Story

      Jun 2, 2022

      Keeping Time With Story
      5 min read

    • Article

      Breaking In

      Oct 18, 2021

      Breaking In
      4 min read

    • Article

      Humble Words Organized Beautifully: Ward Farnsworth on Style

      Aug 19, 2020

      Farnsworth's philosophy of composition is wonderfully anarchic when compared to the partisans of prescription who dominate the writing classroom and the style-guide racket. The post Humble Words Organized Beautifully: Ward Farnsworth on Style appeare

      12 min read

    • Article

      11 Writing-Career Crossroads

      Jun 13, 2022

      11 Writing-Career Crossroads
      9 min read

    • Article

      Talk To The Practitioner: Myriam Gurba

      Nov 13, 2021

      Writer and educator Myriam Gurba may be best known for her epic takedown of Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt, a misguided work of “social justice” wherein the author, a self-described white woman, attempts to step into the shoes of a Mexican refugee. T

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Three-Act Structure

      Jun 12, 2023

      The three-act structure dates back to Aristotle’s Poetics and is the typical structure for much of fiction, particularly in Western culture. While Aristotle’s framework focuses on writing tragic plays and has specific recommendations tied to that for

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Elements of Style

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Elements of Style - William Strunk Jr

      Cover.jpgFront.jpg

      Contents

      I. Introductory

      II. Elementary Rules of Usage

      III. Elementary Principles of Composition

      IV. A Few Matters of Form

      V. Words and Expressions Commonly Misused

      VI. Spelling

      VII. Exercises on Chapters II and III

      I. Introductory

      03.jpg

      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.

      The numbers of the sections may be used as references in correcting manuscript.

      The writer’s colleagues in the Department of English in Cornell University have greatly helped him in the preparation of his manuscript. Mr. George McLane Wood has kindly consented to the inclusion under Rule 10 of some material from his Suggestions to Authors.

      The following books are recommended for reference or further study: in connection with Chapters II and IV, F. Howard Collins, Author and Printer (Henry Frowde); Chicago University Press, Manual of Style; T. L. De Vinne, Correct Composition (The Century Company); Horace Hart, Rules for Compositors and Printers (Oxford University Press); George McLane Wood, Extracts from the Style-Book of the Government Printing Office (United States Geological Survey); in connection with Chapters III and V, The King’s English (Oxford University Press); Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Art of Writing (Putnam), especially the chapter, Interlude on Jargon; George McLane Wood, Suggestions to Authors (United States Geological Survey); John Lesslie Hall, English Usage (Scott, Foresman and Co.); James P. Kelley, Workmanship in Words (Little, Brown and Co.). In these will be found full discussions of many points here briefly treated and an abundant store of illustrations to supplement those given in this book.

      It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature.

      II. Elementary Rules of Usage

      03.jpg

      1. Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding ‘s.

      Follow this rule whatever the final consonant. Thus write,

      Charles’s friend

      Burns’s poems

      the witch’s malice

      This is the usage of the United States Government Printing Office and of the Oxford University Press.

      Exceptions are the possessive of ancient proper names in

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1