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List Price: 9.95
Our Price: $7.95
Product Details
| Shipping Weight: |
0.50 |
| Author(s): |
William Strunk Jr., E. B. White, Roger Angell |
| Vendor: |
BAKER & TAYLOR |
| Publisher: |
Longman |
| Published: |
23 July, 1999 |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
020530902X |
| Store Code: |
2786 |
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Description: Composition teachers throughout the English-speaking world have been pushing this book on their students since it was first published in 1957. Co-author White later revised it, and it remains the most compact and lucid handbook we have for matters of basic principles of composition, grammar, word usage and misusage, and writing style.
Genre: Writing and editing guides; Writing Skills; Style; Language Arts and Disciplines; English Composition; Reference; English; Language; Report writing; Literary style; Composition and Creative Writing - General; Technical Writing; Technology / Technical Writing; Grammar; English language; Rhetoric;
Average Review: 4.5 stars
Review: Useful little book : "The Elements of Style" was written by E.B. White in the 1950s. It is a revised and expanded version of a booklet used by his English professor William Strunk Jr. in 1919. During the years since its publication, the book reached the fourth edition, modernized and more suitable for the times (and the changes in language). While this book was originally aimed at writers (of books and newspaper articles), solid writing skills are important for everyone. In these days of the content-rich web, people spend a lot of their collaboration time online. Blog entries, comments, forum and mailing list posts are quite a bit of writing, and one has to follow some simple but important rules to write correctly and effectively. What's best about it is the size. These days, when the feeling is that writers and publishers get paid by the weight of their huge tomes, it is refreshingly pleasant to hold a small pocket book of only 100 pages, packed with useful information. The guidelines for correct writing are presented as a list of rules, divided to a few subtopics, with a well-selected index making things easy to find. The book answers some of the most common doubts in writing English text: 1. Correct usage of punctuation: commas, colons, semicolons, dashes and periods. 2. Possessive singulars of nouns ("Charles's book") 3. Using the active voice, positive form and definite, concrete language for making a point effectively. 4. Pairs of words that are commonly confused: among/between, inside of/inside, shall/will, that/which On the downside, this book can be seen as overly pedantic. Some words it discourages to use are already ingrained in modern English, and the strict rules it contains aren't the best fit for all kinds of writing. Therefore, I would not advise using this book "religiously" as something obliging. Rather, it is best used as a useful reference for certain things. Some rules you might not agree with, but most of them are just plain common sense of English writing, and rules like the ones I listed above are decidedly essential.
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