The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition 4th Edition

Great grammar guidance book

Attention high school students about to graduate, job applicants, aspiring attorneys and diplomats, or anyone who has written a love letter: the struggle for accurate expression can be a bittersweet challenge, but it must be taken up. All of society depends on it. Written expression is the oil in social machinery. Failure to make a coherent point can be devastating to purpose. To sum it up succinctly: language matters.The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White, is the standard volume for linguistic clarification. Short, comprehensive, and indispensable, it is the definitive source for its subject. The greater your understanding and use of language, the greater your power to define terms and control events. Language mimics a living organism. Language has character and identity. Though its rules can be vague and full of contradictions, language should be effectively understood to be knowledgeably used. Somewhat magically, The Elements of Style directly answers most questions of usage.Improper usage is painful to see written, and lands with a dull thud when heard in the ear of the knowledgeable. For example, a common mistake in usage, is to say “Between he and I.” The word “between” is a preposition, and therefore takes a third person pronoun. Properly stated, the phrase is “Between him and me.” The proper use of that and which, and further and farther is swiftly explained, as well as the accurate use of punctuation when using parentheses.This small compendium is divided into five parts: Elementary Rules of Usage, Elementary Rules of Composition, A Few Matters of Form, Words and Expressions Commonly Misused, and An Approach to Style (with a list of reminders). The authors offer practical advice but acknowledge that writing well is a mysterious process.First rate writers are rarely satisfied with their work. Norman Mailer wrote, “Good writing is not an act to inspire confidence because it is good, but anguish because it is not better.” This may be because variables are infinite and good style eludes definition.Writers express genius and craft in varying degrees. Craft can be taught; genius is innate and cannot be taught. The authors offer modest avowal: “There is no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly…writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.” For the majority of the ungifted, which is to say most of us, The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White, is an indispensable volume, and should be, like a dictionary, within arm’s reach.—Tom Casey

If you're an ex-English major like myself, then this helps you SOOO much. It's worth every dime and provides an interesting approach to professional communications. Business writing, marketing and PR writing, overall composition for Literature students. If you're someone who's studying English Lit, or creative/Professional writing for Pre-Law then this book highlights the fundamentals.

I home schooled my 5 kids and used this book. It is wonderful. Now after selling it, I realized how practical it is for writing, which I now have time to do. Bought it again.

My review of this classic is not seminal or necessary. The Elements of Style is the most frequently assigned text in the Open Syllabus Project’s index of seven million US academic syllabi. Time Magazine and The Guardian have both numbered it among the most influential nonfiction books of the last century. It has sold over ten million copies in its various editions since 1959 and is strongly endorsed by some of the greatest writers of our time, including Stephen King. However, in the words of E.B. White himself, “the true writer always plays to an audience of one.” This is for me.This handbook began as professor Strunk’s “attempt to cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin.” He privately published his pocket-sized list of grammar and composition rules for use at Cornell in 1919, and even after a century of additions and revisions, it remains skeletal and presumptive like a polished crib sheet. Reading it is like running up a hill: arduous ... yet rewarding. And read it we must, if it is to be any use as a reference, because it lacks the visual navigation aids of a true crib sheet. Its discerning wisdom is buried in the text and must be methodically unearthed.Critics cavil at its anachronistic prescriptions (“zombie rules”) such as “do not contact people; get in touch with them,” “avoid starting a sentence with however,” and ”The word people is best not used with words of number, in place of persons” (e.g. “10 persons” not “10 people”). Some even point out with relish that Strunk himself originally used which to introduce a restrictive relative clause within the same handbook proscribing the practice. Indeed, these anachronisms (mainly contained in part four - “Misused Words and Expressions”) demonstrate the book’s inadequacy as an introductory text of grammar and composition.However (wink), as a burgeoning writer seeking a grammar refresher, I found it felicitous. While it lacked the humor and wit of Patricia O’Conner’s Woe is I, it compensated with logical rationale, simplicity, and true insight. After all, “There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing.””As you become proficient in the use of language, your style will emerge, because you yourself will emerge, and when this happens you will find it increasingly easy to break through the barriers that separate you from other minds, other hearts - which is, of course, the purpose of writing, as well as its principal reward.”