The King's English

A practical handbook on clear English usage, arranged into sections on vocabulary, syntax, stylistic ornaments, punctuation, and euphony. It argues for simplicity and directness—favoring familiar, concrete, and concise words—and illustrates widespread mistakes with published examples. Chapters examine relative clauses, participles and gerunds, tense and modal choices, conditionals, prepositions, and sentence structure; they also treat rhetorical balance, inversion, and variation. A long section on punctuation covers commas, semicolons, colons, dashes, hyphens, and quotation marks, while the closing material discusses prose sound and rhythm, including alliteration, sentence accent, and the avoidance of awkward cadences.