The Elements of Style

The Elements of Style, a century old at this point, is a handy reference of basic literary and grammar principles for writers. It’s references as the main inspiration for William Zinsser’s On Writing Well and the most popular text assigned in syllabuses.

One the internet, the opinions vary, between a the book being a must-read and it being outdated and containing inaccurate grammar advices. Nevertheless, it’s a short read, and even if inaccurate it server well as a reminder of writing principles of the uttermost importance.

Notes

The Elements of Style is better kept at hand as a readers manual. Thus, the notes here are brief and reduced to what I found important in particular. Core principle, obvious but often neglected, is: be clear, concise, put your self in the background, and rely on basic construct unless you are certain of what you are doing.

Elementary rules

• Use serial commas

  also referred to as the series comma, Oxford comma, or Harvard comma

• Place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause
• Join independent clauses grammatically completing each other with a semicolon
• Use a dash to set off an abrupt break or interruption and to announce a long appositive or summary

Composition

• Paragraph is the unit of composition. Paragraph may be of any length as long as it holds together.
• Use active voice, unless making a particular word of a sentence the subject calls for a passive voice.
• Put statements in a positive form (“He was not keen of flavored coffee” should be replaced by “He disliked flavored coffee”).
• Use definitive, specific, concrete language
• Omit needles words
• Keep related words together
• The place for the most prominent a word or group of words is usually at the end of a sentence, the second best option is at the beginning.

Form

• Use exclamations sparingly, reserve them for true exclamations and commands.
• Do not spell out numerals unless they are part of a dialogue
• Use italics with capitalized initials for titles of literary work

Style

• Work from a suitable design
• Write with nouns and verbs
• Revise, rewrite, do not overwrite. Diligently strike out words that do not add value to your writing.
• Avoid qualifiers such as rather, very, little, pretty
• Be clear - avoid fancy words, do not explain too much, do not construct awkward adverbs (tangledly -> in tangles), use orthodox spelling, and avoid shortcuts such as abbreviations unless readily understood

Glossary

Exhaustive glossary is at the end of the book. Following terms are relevant to the notes above.

• Appositive - a grammatical construction in which two elements, normally noun phrases, are placed side by side so one element identifies the other in a different way.

  My sister, Alice Smith, likes jelly beans.

• Participle - a verb form used either as an adjective to modify nouns (“the hidden treasure”) or to connect with auxiliary verbs to create different tenses (“we are hiding the treasure”).
• Participial phrase - a modifier that uses the participle to describe a noun (“Walking down the street, he saw kids playing with a ball”).
• Preposition - a function word that combines with a noun phrase to form a phrase (“at the dawn”, “by noon”)