The difference between a verbal participle and a gerund is not always obvious, but note what is really said in each of the following. In the last example, whoever is the subject of looks idle the object of the preposition to is the entire clause whoever looks idle. The contents of a jar may be either singular or plural, depending on whats in the jarjam or marbles. The same principle of comma use applies to participial phrases and to appositives. Here the clause introduced by who does serve to tell which people are meant the sentence, unlike the sentences above, cannot be split into two independent statements.
People who live in glass houses shouldnt throw stones. Restrictive clauses, by contrast, are not parenthetic and are not set off by commas. The last form is an excellent way to write a date the figures are separated by a word and are, for that reason, quickly grasped. Note that it is customary to omit the comma in Will felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, a man floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get his man up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope.
The elements of style how to#
500 this late in the season, to fail half the time to connect with this fat pitch, saddens me, for it seems a betrayal of the man who showed me how to swing at it and made the swinging seem worth while.Īll through The Elements of Style one finds evidences of the authors deep sympathy for the reader. I suppose I have written the fact that a thousand times in the heat of composition, revised it out maybe five hundred times in the cool aftermath. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times.īut a shadow of gloom seems to hang over the page, and you feel that he knows how hopeless his cause is. In the days when I was sitting in his class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having shortchanged himselfa man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock. Omit needless words! cries the author on page 23, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul.
The Elements of Style, Revised Edition, by William Strunk Jr.Īnd Edward A. The New Yorker, and was copyrighted in 1957 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. The Introduction originally appeared, in slightly different form, in With Revisions, an Introduction, and a Chapter on WritingĬopyright © 1979, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.Įarlier editions © 1959 and © 1972 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. Q&N: The Elements of Style (Strunk and White) from
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