III. 6. “What’s this little guy?” I asked, picking it up and opening it to the Introduction. I was confident that my little shortcut to scholarship would work just as well as tedium and elbow grease. By becoming wrapped up in a character's thoughts and actions in a book, story, or poem, people experience that narrator's point of view and can draw on that knowledge and those feelings when interacting with others in real life who might have similar thought processes or actions. I don’t understand the last sentence of your Bio at the bottom of the post. I enjoyed reading and the typical curriculum for an English major in college requires a lot of that. Defining Style As a concept, "style" is hard to pin down. But even in 2017, The Elements of Style occupies a pride of place in the canon of literary how-to manuals, with many teachers holding it up Bible-ishly, and with many students following it to the letter. The reader might wonder how a curt and abbreviated overview of English writing style can be of any value to someone whose journey through academia wasn’t as lackadaisical as my own. 5. I came upon it as the 41 year-old father of a college freshman. 12/13/2020 AP English Language and Composition; 1/3 Style Analysis Directions: There are two parts to this assignment, so read the instructions for Parts 1 and 2 carefully. The Elements of Style is concise, easy to understand and practically perfect. Getting papers back from professors with generous red edit marks not only for grammar mistakes but also stilted and trite phrasing was bad enough. Studying a text closely helps to unearth layers of meaning that run deeper than just the basic plot, which happens on the surface level. ( Log Out /  In many ways, stylistics is an interdisciplinarity study of textual interpretations, using both language comprehension and an understanding of social dynamics. Other articles where Elements of Criticism is discussed: Henry Home, Lord Kames: …is best known for his Elements of Criticism, 3 vol. It is even referenced by some of the other books mentioned in this post. Arriving from community college into the upper-division  English program at State — at the time, reputedly, one of the best Creative Writing programs in the country — I experienced a rather abrupt and rude awakening. So I set about to learn writing by osmosis. I was immediately intrigued, as I usually am, by something that promises a short-cut method of achieving  results that normally require some effort. Ever. A stylistician's textual analysis is influenced by rhetoric reasoning and history. However, he also notes that stylistics differs from simple close reading in the following ways: Stylistics is arguing for the universality of language usage while close reading hinges upon an observation of how this particular style and usage may vary from and thereby make an error relating to the norm. Kindle Edition. Analyzing an author's style involves understanding the particular way a text is written. Brief as it may be, Strunk & White’s little volume is an excellent refresher course for even the most accomplished and diligent scholar of English. It is liberally illustrated with examples, with correct and incorrect usage in parallel, and has a whole section on common mistakes. Elementary Rules From Elements of Style: Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding ‘s In series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas. 2. I still have the book and i’m still learning from it. The Elements of Style (p. 1). It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. Choose from 500 different sets of literature elements style flashcards on Quizlet. Big-Picture Elements. Erin Tubridy Gates is the founder and principal designer of Erin Gates Design and is also the creator of the award winning design blog Elements of Style. According to Katie Wales in "A Dictionary of Stylistics," the goal of. ( Log Out /  This book is a terse pocket-guide full of best practices for forming sentences. Get this from a library! Diction: The correctness of the overall grammar (big picture) or … Culture is a complex concept that encompasses the ways that social life effects and informs our experiences. White has just been republished in a 50th-anniversary edition. 3. It contains eight rules of usage, ten rules of composition, some notes on miscellaneous matters of form in writing (such as headings, numerals, and quotations), and … Write in a chronological sequence and format in logical sequence (one paragraph: one idea, go from simpler to more complex) Some may swear by it, but let’s be clear: this book is … (1762), a work remarkable in the history of aesthetics for its attempt to equate beauty with what is pleasant to the natural senses of sight and hearing. Here, from the Kindle Edition, are the subjects covered in the Table of Contents. Examples and Observations "[C]ritical analysis involves breaking down an idea or a statement, such as a claim, and subjecting it to critical thinking in order to test its validity." Here is the introduction to the 1920 edition, available for the Kindle, free of charge, from Amazon.com: “This book aims to give in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style. While  until twenty years after my brief sojourn in the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University (then San Francisco State College.) ThoughtCo uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. With respect to this theory, literature falls under th… The free Kindle version is an excellent research tool, but E.B.White’s later resurrection and  editorial annotation of Professor Strunk’s, originally mimeographed and hand-stapled, handout is well worth the price of one of Amazon’s  hard copies. The Elements of Style William Strunk, Jr. © Vernon Miles Kerr and vernonmileskerr.com, 2013-2018. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of William Strunk and E.B. This book is a terse pocket-guide full of best practices for forming sentences. While until twenty years after my brief sojourn in the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University (then San Francisco State College.) Art criticism is analyzing and evaluating works of art. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. It’s the best. New Criticism is an approach to literature made popular in the 20th century that evolved out of formalist criticism. An author’s writing style includes all of the items on the list below, including specific word choice (diction), kind of tone, use of formal or informal language, etc. This Study Guide consists of approximately 34 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Elements of Style. American poet Dorothy Parker has, regarding the book, said: How an author uses them is what makes one writer's work distinct from another, from Henry James to Mark Twain to Virginia Woolf. Dr. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks. Analyzing an author's style involves analyzing the writer's unique way of communicating ideas. Stylistics, then, is the pursuit of understanding key elements of style that affect a given audience's interpretation of a text. He says that stylistics' analysis of these similar qualities—or rather how they are utilized—would, therefore, entail that stylistics is a modern interpretation of the ancient study. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition, is the absolute must-have book for anyone aspiring to write any sort of content. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Vernon Miles Kerr and vernonmileskerr.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. The Elements of Style Criticism. Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Plot Summary of “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr.. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Assonance: Close repetition of vowels, used for effect. The Elements of Style was listed as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923 by Time in its 2011 list. Rhetorical analysis is a form of criticism that uses principles of rhetoric to examine interactions between a text, an author, and an audience. As art critics, when we look at a painting, sculpture, or other form of art, we don't approach it as something that we like or dislike. Hopefully they will whet the reader’s appetite for Strunk’s witty and sometimes humorous expansion of each subject and also the contributions of Strunk’s posthumous editor and former student, the poet E.B.White. The Elements of Style was required for my Communication 101 class in 1956. In my high school and early college days, “being a writer” was my dream, but the act of writing and pouring through peevish grammar texts was drudgery. Human life has an aesthetic dimension in most parts of life meaning there will be a lot of potential for criticism. This type of Criticism is considered to be a part of aesthetics which are concerned with judging the beauty and awareness style and fashion and other issues of human sentiment very critically. The Elements of Style Summary. Just as a baseball pitcher studies how to properly grip and throw a type of pitch a certain way, to make the ball go in a certain location, and to create a game plan based on a lineup of specific hitters, studying writing and literature helps people to learn how to improve their writing (and thus communication skills) as well as to learn empathy and the human condition. Strunk and White's The Elements of Style deals only with style in the narrow sense. The original Elements of Style was a textbook written by William Strunk Jr. for his Cornell English class. Basic Elements of Style – Diction, Syntax, Point of View, Tone, Theme Diction = word choice – A study of diction is the analysis of how a writer uses language for a distinct purpose and effect, including word choice and figures of speech. White's The Elements of Style … Also called literary linguistics, stylistics focuses on the figures, tropes, and other rhetorical devices used to provide variety and a distinctness to someone's writing. ( Log Out /  I came upon it as the 41 year-old father of a college freshman. I didn’t learn about The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. Thanks for the comment, Mitch. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Elementary Principles of Composition. Place a comma before and or but introducing an independent clause. It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention (in Chapters II and III) on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated. 4. It is linguistic analysis plus literary criticism. It is even referenced by some of the other books mentioned in this post. 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