Download or read book The Mechanics of Writing (Classic Reprint) written by Edwin Campbell Woolley and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-02 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Mechanics of Writing In order to write English in a way that befits an educated person, one must know a certain body of rules. The term rules is here used in a wide sense, including not only general precepts, such as the dictum that in a sentence "every part should be subservient to one principal affirmation," but also those numerous particular precepts which refuse to merge themselves into convenient generalizations - for instance, those to the effect that it is bad English to say "I devote my evenings in study" for "I devote my evenings to study," that the verb except should not be used in the sense of accept, nor the noun principle in the sense of the adjective principal, and that all right should be written as two words, the first spelled with two l's. When I say that one must know these rules, I mean that one must not merely be acquainted with them, but habitually observe them. Some of these rules are known and followed by nearly every person who has grown up in an English-speaking community. Nearly every such person knows, for example, the correct meaning of several hundred English words (that is to say, he knows several hundred rules directing how these words should be used); knows how to spell certain words, fewer than those which he knows how to use; and knows that the pronoun I and such nouns as John, Mary, Smith, and Jones should be capitalized. But ignorance of many other rules - which might easily be enumerated if there were any need - is shared by children in the grammar school, boys and girls in high school, high-school graduates of recent and of long standing, college freshmen, college seniors, bachelors and masters of arts, and members of the learned professions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.