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''The Elements of Style'' ("the little book" – 1918 , "Strunk & White") is an American English Writing Style Guide originally detailing eight elementary rules of usage, ten elementary principles of composition, "a few matters of form", and a list of words or expressions described by its Prescriptivist authors as being commonly misused. Updated Edition s of the paperback book are often required reading for American High School and College composition classes. HISTORY The book was originally written and privately Published by Cornell University professor William Strunk Jr. and was first revised with the help of Edward A. Tenny in 1935 . In 1957 , it came to the attention of E. B. White at '' The New Yorker ''. White studied under Strunk in 1919 but had forgotten the "little book", a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English". A few weeks later, White wrote a piece for ''The New Yorker'' lauding Professor Strunk and his devotion to "lucid" English prose. Because the book's original author had died in 1946 , Macmillan And Company commissioned White to recast a new edition of ''Elements of Style'', which was published in 1959 . In this revision White independently expanded and modernized the 1918 work and created "Strunk & White". White's first edition sold some two million copies, and the first three editions totalled ten million over a span of four decades. Strunk's original version concentrated on specific questions of usage, cultivating what he considered good adapted from his ''New Yorker'' article. He also added the concluding chapter, ''An Approach to Style '', a broader prescriptive guide to writing in English . White updated two more editions of ''The Elements of Style'' in 1972 and 1979 , when it grew to 85 pages. By the time the fourth edition of "Strunk and White" appeared in 1999 , its second author had died, and the manuscript rights were acquired by Longman , who added a foreword by White's stepson, Roger Angell , an afterword by Charles Osgood , a glossary, and an index. An anonymous editor modified the text of this 1999 edition. Among other minor changes, he or she removed White's spirited defense of "he" for nouns embracing both genders. See the "they" entry in Section IV and also Gender-specific Pronouns . The year 2005 saw the release of ''The Elements of Style Illustrated'', with design and illustrations by Maira Kalman . The text follows the 1999 edition. WILLIAM STRUNK'S ORIGINAL VERSION The rules can themselves be listed quite easily, though much of the value of the text is not only in the rules themselves but in Strunk and White's explanations and their copious (and humorous) examples. Elementary rules of usage #Form the Possessive Singular of nouns with 's. #In a series of three or more terms with a single Conjunction , use a comma after each term except the last. #Enclose Parenthetic Expression s between commas. #Place a comma before 'and' or 'but' introducing an Independent Clause . #Do not join Independent Clauses by a comma. #Do not break sentences in two. #A Participial Phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the Grammatical Subject . # Divide Words At Line-ends , in accordance with their formation and pronunciation. Elementary principles of composition
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