The Elements of Style

From GM-RKB
Jump to navigation Jump to search

The Elements of Style is a style guide.



References

2018a

  • (Wikipedia, 2018) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style Retrieved:2018-11-14.
    • The Elements of Style is a prescriptive American English writing style guide in numerous editions. The original was composed by William Strunk Jr., in 1918, and published by Harcourt, in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage", ten "elementary principles of composition", "a few matters of form", a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused", and a list of 57 "words often misspelled". E. B. White greatly enlarged and revised the book for publication by Macmillan in 1959. That was the first edition of the so-called "Strunk & White", which Time named in 2011 as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.[1]

2018b

  • (Wikipedia, 2018) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style#History Retrieved:2018-11-14.
    • Cornell University English professor William Strunk Jr. wrote The Elements of Style in 1918 and privately published it in 1919, for use at the university. (Harcourt republished it in 52-page format in 1920.) Later, for publication, he and editor Edward A. Tenney revised it as The Elements and Practice of Composition (1935). In 1957, at The New Yorker, the style guide reached the attention of E.B. White, who had studied writing under Strunk in 1919 but had since forgotten "the little book" that he described as a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English". Weeks later, White wrote a feature story about Strunk's devotion to lucid English prose.

       Macmillan and Company subsequently commissioned White to revise The Elements for a 1959 edition (Strunk had died in 1946). White's expansion and modernization of Strunk and Tenney's 1935 revised edition yielded the writing style manual informally known as "Strunk & White", the first edition of which sold about two million copies in 1959. More than ten million copies of three editions were later sold. [2] Mark Garvey relates the history of the book in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style (2009). Maira Kalman, who provided the illustrations for The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005, see below), asked Nico Muhly to compose a cantata based on the book. It was performed at the New York Public Library in October 2005.

  1. Skarda, Erin (August 16, 2011). "Elements of Style". All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books. Time, Inc.. http://entertainment.time.com/2011/08/30/all-time-100-best-nonfiction-books/slide/elements-of-style-by-strunk-and-white. Retrieved 2014-05-14. 
  2. Strunk and White (2009), p. x.