here's an updated patch incorporating the feedback from Ezio and Eric:

   - moved docstrings put in some __special__ method names
   - made the description of 'tag' consistent:  'tag' means the elements name (as opposed to 'tag' being a synonym for "element"!)
   - docstring args now *stared* as opposed to 'quoted'


I also gave a shot at copying the existing docstrings into their respective C counterparts.  But it *seems* like you can't do so
that easily for a C extension. Maybe I missed something though: 

>>> from _elementtree import Element as cElement
>>> cElement.__doc__ = 'foobarbaz'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: can't set attributes of built-in/extension type 'xml.etree.ElementTree.Element'

I see one example in Modules/_json.c where the docstrings were sorta copied and pasted over, so perhaps it's an ok thing to do.