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The Elements of Style (also called Strunk & White) is a style guide for formal grammar used in American English writing. The first publishing was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage," ten "elementary principles of composition," "a few matters of form," a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused," and a ...
A double negative is a construction occurring when two forms of grammatical negation are used in the same sentence. This is typically used to convey a different shade of meaning from a strictly positive sentence ("You're not unattractive" vs "You're attractive"). Multiple negation is the more general term referring to the occurrence of more ...
Linguistic prescription[ a ] is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language. [ 1 ][ 2 ] These rules may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Sometimes informed by linguistic purism, [ 3 ] such normative practices often propagate the belief that some usages ...
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
t. e. English subordinators (also known as subordinating conjunctions or complementizers) are words that mostly mark clauses as subordinate. The subordinators form a closed lexical category in English and include whether; and, in some of their uses, if, that, for, arguably to, and marginally how. Syntactically, they appear immediately before ...
Show, don't tell. Show, don't tell is a narrative technique used in various kinds of texts to allow the reader to experience the story through actions, words, subtext, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the author's exposition, summarization, and description. [1] It avoids adjectives describing the author's analysis and instead ...
The first English grammar, Bref Grammar for English by William Bullokar, published in 1586, does not use the term "auxiliary" but says: All other verbs are called verbs-neuters-un-perfect because they require the infinitive mood of another verb to express their signification of meaning perfectly: and be these, may, can, might or mought, could, would, should, must, ought, and sometimes, will ...
A fumblerule is a rule of language or linguistic style, humorously written in such a way that it breaks this rule. [1] Fumblerules are a form of self-reference. The science editor George L. Trigg published a list of such rules in 1979. [2] The term fumblerules was coined in a list of such rules compiled by William Safire on Sunday, 4 November ...