A Supplement to Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (3rd ed.

)
B.W. Van Norden
(Version of August 31, 2005.)

Introduction

The third edition of The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White is an excellent
guide to the basic principles of English style. However, as times change, students start making
different kinds of errors. Consequently, I have composed this list of supplemental rules to
remind students of rules that The Elements of Style takes for granted. Below, I begin by listing
the most important of Strunk and White's rules, and then list my additional rules, with
explanations and examples. Sample sentences (marked with a "!") are correct unless otherwise
indicated.

Rules

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

An exception is that the possessive of the pronoun it is its. The word it's (with the apostrophe)
means it is.

! If you own a car, it's a good idea to change its oil every 10,000 miles.

2. In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term
except the last.

! I have a dog, two cats and three fish.

3. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas.

! My dog, who is usually quite friendly, barked at her ferociously.

You do not put the expression in commas if it identifies which of several things of the same kind
you are talking about:

! My cat who has black spots is friendly, but my cat who has brown spots is shy.

4. Place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause.

! He is a jerk, and he smells bad.

5. Do not join independent clauses by a comma.

! WRONG: James Joyce was one of the greatest writers in the English language, his
first major work was Dubliners.
! RIGHT: James Joyce was one of the greatest writers in the English language; his first
 major work was Dubliners.
! RIGHT: James Joyce was one of the greatest writers in the English language. His first
major work was Dubliners.

Joining independent clauses with a comma is called a "comma splice" or a "run-on sentence."

6. Do not break sentences in two.

! WRONG: He spent twenty years revising his book. Which shows just how important
it was to him.
! RIGHT: He spent twenty years revising his book, which shows just how important it
was to him.

7. Use a colon after an independent clause to introduce a list of particulars, an appositive, an

amplification or an illustrative quotation.

! WRONG: My pets include: a dog, two cats and three fish.

! RIGHT: I have several pets: a dog, two cats and three fish.

8. Use a dash to set off an abrupt break or interruption and to introduce a long appositive or
summary.

See Rule 31, below, for examples.

9. The number of the subject determines the number of the verb.

! WRONG: "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."1
! RIGHT: Families are where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.

! WRONG: "Is our children learning?"2

! RIGHT: Are our children learning?

Notice that footnote markers go outside (i.e., to the right) of all other punctuation.

10. Use the proper case of pronoun.

The pronouns I, we, he, she and they should be the subjects of verbs. The pronouns me, us him,
her and them are the objects of verbs or prepositions.

! WRONG: "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy
test.''3
! RIGHT: You teach a child to read, and he or she will be able to pass a literacy test.

1
George W. Bush, speech in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, Oct. 18, 2000.
2
George W. Bush, speech in Florence, South Carolina, Jan. 11, 2000.
3
George W. Bush, speech in Townsend, Tennessee, Feb. 21, 2001.
 ! WRONG: He gave the books to he and I.
! RIGHT: He gave the books to him and me.

11. A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.
...
14. Use the active voice.

! WRONG: Truth was thought by Descartes to be hard to discover.

! RIGHT: Descartes thought that truth is hard to discover.

...
17. Omit needless words.
...
23. Put brief quotations in double quotation marks.

! Another time she asks Susan, "Is it sunny all the time in the world where you live?"
And Susan replies, "Yes, it is, and unlike most people, I don't freckle."4

24 Put commas and periods inside quotation marks.

! "I never thought I'd someday be playing a superhero, certainly not at my age," says the
47-year-old Spiner with a laugh.5

Exceptions: In the British Commonwealth, the convention is to mark brief quotations with single
quotation marks, and to put the period or comma outside the quotation marks. However, you are
not in the British Commonwealth, so follow the U.S. convention on punctuation. In addition,
computer scientists sometimes put commas and periods outside of the quotation marks to make
clear the syntax of a computer command or URL. It is acceptable to follow this convention when
writing a URL.

25. If another quotation starts within a quotation marked by double quotation marks, put this
second quotation in single quotation marks.

! It wasn't until a chance encounter with a Hollywood producer during a visit to Los
Angeles that Walker considered acting as a career. "I was having dinner, and this guy
came up to me in the restaurant and said, 'You're really funny. I have a part in a movie for
you,'" she recalls. "I thought, 'What a weirdo.'"6

! "In the '80's, all of a sudden it was fashionable to say, 'We're not paying teachers
enough. We should be paying them some more,'" said Linda Rosenblatt, spokeswoman

4
Jeff Jarvis, review of Suddenly Susan, TV Guide, November 23-29, 1996, p. 16.
5
Michael Logan, "Star Trek VIII: Making 'Contact,'" TV Guide, November 23-29, 1996,
p. 41.
6
Hilary de Vries, "Portrait of a Profiler," TV Guide, December 7-13, 1996, p. 40.
 for New York State United Teachers.7

There is almost never a good reason for having a single quotation surrounded by both double and
single quotation marks. In other words a sentence punctuated like the following is almost always
incorrect: " 'The rule of virtue may be compared to the Pole Star.' " In contrast, both of the
following sentences are punctuated correctly:

! Analects 2:1 says, "Confucius said, 'The rule of virtue may be compared to the Pole
Star.'"

! Analects 2:1 says, "The rule of virtue may be compared to the Pole Star."

However, the second sentence is more concise and elegant (unless for some reason you wanted
to stress the fact that the quotation was specifically attributed to Confucius by the Analects).

26. Long quotations (usually of three or more lines) are set off from the rest of the text in the
following ways: they are single-spaced, with one blank line before and one after the quotation,
and their left and right margins are set in farther than the surrounding text. The first sentence of
such a quotation is not indented. One should never put quotation marks around an entire
quotation set off in this way.

! The intellectual distance between the narrator and Lucie becomes evident early in their
relationship:

When Lucie found me at the appointed place with a book in my

hand, she asked me what I was reading. I showed her the pages it
was open to. "Poetry!" she said in amazement. "Do you find it
strange for me to be reading poetry?" She shrugged her shoulders
and said, "No, why should it be?" But I think she did, because in
all probability she identified poetry with children's books.8

Remember: if a quotation is long, format it as above. If it is shorter, just put quotation marks
around it. But never put quotation marks around something you have already formatted as a long
quotation!

27. If a comment in parentheses is part of a longer sentence, the final punctuation goes outside
the parentheses.

! After his breakdown and removal from the school boarding house, his parents sent him
to a London psychoanalyst in the belief, apparently, that his troubles were attributable to
homosexuality (a condition his father considered only marginally less heinous than

7
Melinda Rice, "Teachers' Pay Stirs Emotions," Poughkeepsie Journal, December 9,
1996, pp. 1A, 3A.
8
Milan Kundera, The Joke (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 63.
 Bolshevism).9

The only exception to this rule is when the sense of the parenthetical comment requires an
exclamation point or question mark.

! Wendy is whining in frustration like any out-of-control adolescent would (sadly, she's
in her 20s!), but Pauline is trying to teach her adult responsibility.10

! We all smoked except for Morey Amsterdam (wasn't he the smartest one of all?), and
we smoked a lot.11

28. If a sentence begins and ends within parentheses, the final punctuation goes inside the
parentheses.

! Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz collected negatives from around the world to
restore Gene Allen's uncredited flower-filled art direction to its proper glory. (Working
individually or together, they have also rescued prints of "Lawrence of Arabia,"
"Spartacus," and, most recently, "Vertigo.")12

29. "Cannot" is used to expresses the impossibility of doing something. "Cannot" is one word.

! I cannot understand what you mean.

This means that I am not capable of understanding what you mean. The rare two-word
expression "can not" is used to express the possibility of not doing something. If you were to
write, "I can not understand what you mean," it would mean "I am capable of not understanding
what you mean." "Can not" is used correctly in the following sentence:

! If we improve efficiency, we can not only avoid laying people off, we can also increase
our profits.

30. A hyphen can have one of several uses, but one common use is to indicate that two words are
to be read together as a compound adjective.

! In 1991 Todd Marinovich had a three-year, $2.25 million contract as a first-round draft
choice with the L.A. Raiders.13
9
John Carey, "Introduction," in Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1993), p. xv.
10
Laura Schlessinger, "Dr. Laura's Prime-Time Checkup," TV Guide, August 30, 1997, p.
32.
11
Mary Tyler Moore, After All (New York: Dell Publishing, 1995), pp. 133-134.
12
Gene Siskel, "'Lady' Proves Rex Is No Ordinary Man," TV Guide, November 23-29,
1996, p. 18.
13
Barbara Kantrowitz, Adam Rogers and Allison Samuels, "Don't Just Do It for Daddy,"
Newsweek, December 9, 1996, p. 56.
Be careful not to overuse hyphens. If in doubt, leave the hyphen out.

31. A dash is very different from a hyphen in both use and appearance. Strunk and White explain
the proper use of a dash in their Rule 8. In appearance, a dash is longer than a hyphen. If your
word processor does not have a special symbol for a dash, write a dash as two hyphens, side by
side, with a space on either side of the dash. Notice the differences between the hyphens and the
dashes in the following examples.

! If nothing else, years of racist treatment at golf courses -- Tiger is one-eighth Native
American, one-eighth African-American, one-quarter white, one-quarter Chinese, one-
quarter Thai -- should have left him bitter.14

! In a child-centered family, the star athlete gets all the attention. Everything else -- the
parents' marriage, siblings -- is secondary.15

32. Using "whom" correctly requires a firm grasp of English grammar. This is why the trend
today is for "who" to replace "whom" in most contexts. The one situation in which you
absolutely must use "whom" is when the word is the object of a preposition: "to whom," "for
whom," "with whom," "by whom," "at whom." "Who" cannot be used for "whom" in any of
those contexts. (See also Strunk and White, Rule 10.)

33. "To beg the question" is a phrase misused with alarming frequency nowadays. "Begging the
question" is the name of the logical fallacy (i.e., error in reasoning) which consists of assuming
what you are trying to prove. People often misuse this expression to mean "raises the question"
or "suggests the question."

! WRONG: "And that, of course, begs the question: Just what, exactly, is the belief
underlying those convictions, the rock upon which faith and empire are built?"16
! RIGHT: And that, of course, suggests a question: Just what, exactly, is the belief
underlying those convictions, the rock upon which faith and empire are built?

The following two sentences are both correct:

14
John McCormick and Sharon Begley, "How to Raise a Tiger," Newsweek, December 9,
1996, p. 54.
15
Kantrowitz et al., ibid.
16
David Van Biema, "Kingdom Come," Time Magazine, 150:5 (August 4, 1997), p. 55.
 ! Instead of supplying a persuasive argument in favor of the proposed spending, he
simply begs the question of whether it is justified.

! All this spending raises the question of whether we are really getting our money's
worth.

More is at stake here than some minor point of grammar. If you don't know what "begging the
question" means, then you probably won't recognize when someone is doing it. In this era of
increasing dogmatism and irrationalism, we need people to raise questions, not beg them.