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    The Elements of Style
    The Elements of Style
    The Elements of Style
    Audiobook1 hour

    The Elements of Style

    Written by William Strunk Jr

    Narrated by LibriVox Community

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    About this audiobook

    “The Elements of Style (1918) by William Strunk, Jr. is an American English writing style guide. It is one of the best-known and most influential prescriptive treatment of English grammar and usage, and often is required reading in U.S. high school and university composition classes. The original 1918 edition of The Elements of Style detailed eight elementary rules of usage, ten elementary principles of composition, “a few matters of form”, and a list of commonly "misused" words and expressions. This book, printed as a private edition in 1918 for the use of his students, became a classic on the local campus, known as "the little book", and its successive editions have since sold over ten million copies. This version is based on the public-domain text from 1918, which was originally uploaded to Wikibooks and wikified by Wikibooks:User:Lord Emsworth in 2003. In January 2006, Kernigh transwikied the text from Wikibooks:Elements of Style to Wikisource.” (Summary by Wikipedia and Wikisource)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLibriVox
    Release dateAug 25, 2014
    Author

    William Strunk Jr

    William Strunk, Jr. (1869-1946) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the eldest of William and Ella Garretson Strunk's four children. Strunk excelled in school, eventually earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Cincinnati and a PhD at Cornell University. He then attended the Sorbonne and the Collège de France from 1898-99 where he studied morphology and philology. Strunk began his academic career teaching mathematics at Rose Polytechnical Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana from 1890-91, then returned to Cornell and taught English there for 46 years. In 1922 he published English Metres, a study of poetic metrical form, and began writing he critical editions of various classical works. Strunk joined a literary group called the Manuscript Club which held Saturday night meetings to discuss writing and literature. There, Strunk met and became friends with a young aspiring writer, Elwyn Brooks ("E.B.") White. In 1918, Strunk published The Elements of Style, but originally only intended it to be used by his Cornell students, who nicknamed it "the little book." In 1935, Strunk and Edward A. Tenney revised the manuscript and re-published the guide for wider distribution as The Elements and Practice of Composition. Years later, after Strunk had passed away, E.B. White - now working at the New Yorker - praised the "little book" in his column, calling it a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English." As a result of the new attention White's praise generated for Strunk's manuscript, Macmillan and Company commissioned White to revise the 1935 edition for republication. The resulting book became an immediate hit. Since The Elements of Style (now credited to both Strunk and White) was originally republished in 1959, sales of the book - and subsequent editions - has exceeded ten million copies and the book is often referred to simply as "Strunk and White." William Strunk retired from Cornell in 1937 and in 1945 he suffered a mental breakdown, diagnosed as "senile psychosis." He died less than a year later at the Hudson River Psychiatric Institute in Poughkeepsie, New York.

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