The King's English

Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.

There is not much opportunity in English for going wrong here, because we have shed most of our cases. The personal pronouns, and _who_ and its compounds, are the only words tha...

5. Euphony demands that ‘that that’ should become ‘that which’, even when the words are separated; and many writers, from a feeling that ‘which’ is the natural correlative of th...

Some of the more obvious devices of humorous writers, being fatally easy to imitate, tend to outlive their natural term, and to become a part of the injudicious novice’s stock-i...

remain subject to precisely the same conditions as the corresponding paratactic sentences. Thus ‘Among whom were....’ is right, just as ‘Among the guests were....’ was right; ‘A...

In this chapter we shall adhere generally to our plan of not giving systematic positive directions, or attempting to cover all ground familiar and unfamiliar, important or not,...

Some less important chapters had been designed on Euphony, Ambiguity, Negligence, and other points. But as the book would with them have run to too great length, some of the exa...

ii. _As_ should be used only to give the cause of the thing asserted, not the cause of the assertion, nor an illustration of its truth, as in the following instances:

‘The author pleads that all children of whatever birth shall be carefully taught the “standard dialect”--the English, that is to say, of the educated class, and often hitherto r...

ENGLISH COMPOSITION, Progressive Exercises (A Two-Years’ Course for upper forms), by C. E. L. HAMMOND. With an introduction by J. C. SMITH. Pp. 176. 3s. 6d. Also in two parts: P...