The Elements of Style — William Strunk

This book aims to give in brief space the principal requi rements of plain English style It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention in Chap ters II and III on a few essentials the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated In ac cordance with this plan it lays down three rules for the use of the comma instead of a score or more and one for the use of the semicolon in the belief that these four rules provide for all the internal punctuation that is required by nineteen sen tences out of twenty Similarly it gives in Chapter III only those principles of the paragraph and the sentence which are of the widest application The book thus covers only a small portion of the field of English style The experience of its writer has been that once past the essentials students profit most by individual instruction based on the problems of their own work and that each instructor has his own body of the ory which he may prefer to that offered by any textbook Tanıtm Bülteninden