Description

This book aims to give in brief space theprincipal requirements of plain English style. It aims to lightenthe task of instructor and student by concentrating attention (inChapters II and III) on a few essentials, the rules of usage andprinciples of composition most commonly violated. In accordancewith 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 internalpunctuation that is required by nineteen sentences out of twenty.Similarly, it gives in Chapter III only those principles of theparagraph and the sentence which are of the widest application. Thebook thus covers only a small portion of the field of Englishstyle. The experience of its writer has been that once past theessentials, students profit most by individual instruction based onthe problems of their own work, and that each instructor has hisown body of theory, which he may prefer to that offered by anytextbook.