The Elements of Style

Description

The Elements of Style is the most influential American English practical style guide on improving writing skills. Written originally in 1918, by William Strunk Jr., a professor of English at the Cornell University, and later revised and enlarged by his former student E. B. White, it is a comprehensive text covering elements of English language style, usage, and composition also focusing on misused and misspelled words. The version revised by E.B. White, was named by Time in 2011 one of the top 100 most influential English books since 1923.

The book contains “elementary composition principles, “elementary rules of usage”, “matters of form”, commonly misused expressions and words, and a list of often misspelled – these all make for a rather small, but comprehensive volume in a few dozen pages that covers a lot of style and grammar issues and pays tribute to classic high-end English.

The message that came with this work is to ensure an efficient and clean communication style by omitting needless, parasitic words and expressions, by using active voice, and parallel construction on parallel concepts. It also has tips on how to develop an effective and natural style. Among other recommendations are:avoid qualifiers, be concise, do not overdo with explanations, avoid adverbs, avoid dialect, do not insert opinion, use the standard rather than the unconventional and new (the author even lists a bunch of trendy words which, according to him,would lose popularity very rapidly by the time the book is published).Writing is also about pleasing yourself and aiming for that moment of sublime satisfaction from the conveyed message and the way it is done.

According to Strunk, “vigorous writing is concise”, implying that a sentence must be stripped off of any unnecessary parts,which can obscure its structure and flow.
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