Part 1

Produced by Jana Srna and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation. Some corrections of spelling and punctuation have been made. They are listed at the end of the text.

Where examples were printed in two columns in the original, the left column has been indented by two spaces, the right one by four.

Italic text has been marked with underscores. Bold text has been marked with =equals signs=. ]

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

BY WILLIAM STRUNK, Jr.

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN CORNELL UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1918, 1919, BY WILLIAM STRUNK, JR.

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.

THE MAPLE PRESS YORK PA

CONTENTS

Page

I. Introductory 5

II. Elementary Rules of Usage 7

1. Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's 7

2. In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last 7

3. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas 8

4. Place a comma before a conjunction introducing a co-ordinate clause 10

5. Do not join independent clauses by a comma 11

6. Do not break sentences in two 12

7. A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject 13

III. Elementary Principles of Composition 15

8. Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one paragraph to each topic 15

9. As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic sentence; end it in conformity with the beginning 17

10. Use the active voice 19

11. Put statements in positive form 21

12. Use definite, specific, concrete language 22