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Style and Usage, part one |
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| I call this set of annotations ‘part one’ because I am confident that I will return to this category of books at some point. It is never a good idea to trust only one source of information about style and usage, and it is always helpful to expand or refresh your collection of references from time to time. The five books listed here are the ones I use most often, and which I think would be the most useful for any writer or editor. This is not to say that these are definitive or standard texts, or that I make reference to them every day, or even every week. They are comforting to have handy, often useful, and a worthwhile collection of sound thinking in their respective fields. | ||||
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The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words. Bill Bryson. 2nd edition, 1987. Penguin. 0-14-051200-4
A note on the back cover of this book says that it is also available in an American edition called the Facts on File Dictionary of Troublesome Words. Bill Bryson was born, studied, and began work as an editor and writer in the United States; he later moved to England, where he continued work on newspapers and even contributed to a Canadian language textbook. All this is relevant as a demonstration of his linguistic tolerance: his book is mercifully free of transatlantic baiting about the correctness of one regional usage over another. This brief reference guide is ‘the product of questions encountered during the course of daily newspaper work’. It collects several hundred comments on commonly misused words, illustrated with examples from major newspapers, and explains why the preferred usage is better than the error. Like any successful work of this type, it tries to be a compilation of conventions rather than a set of rules, and it presents its arguments clearly. |
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Mind the Stop: A Brief Guide to Punctuation. G.V. Carey. 1958 (1976). Penguin. 0-14-051072-9 English punctuation is not quite as chaotic as English spelling, but it comes close. As with spelling, many of us have very clear opinions about what we believe to be right or wrong; we tend to forget that punctuation is a matter of convention and contingency, rather than a set of natural rules. The Chicago Manual, in company with all the other publisher’s style books, lays out what it will and will not tolerate in a manuscript. Carey’s book is a statement of principles derived from a lifetime of reading, proof-correcting, teaching, and publishing. Writers should always defer, or attempt to defer, to what readers expect to see; but as we develop our own ideas about punctuation, it helps to think deeply about what each punctuation mark is for, and why we choose to use it the way convention dictates we should. Carey’s thinking is thorough and convincing. It is also a joy to read his book: he treats an admittedly obscure topic with style and enthusiasm, and he is never boring. |
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The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar. Sylvia Chalker & Edmund Weiner. 1994. Oxford University Press. 0-19-861314-8 My comments about ‘rules’ in this set of annotations – and elsewhere – will indicate that I believe in descriptive rather than prescriptive grammar. So what do these terms mean? Turning to this short but thorough Oxford dictionary, I find that ‘descriptive’ refers to ‘the structure of a language at a given time’, or ‘language as it is used’, and ‘prescriptive’ to a grammar ‘concerned with laying down rules of usage’. There are often times when we need to know the standard meaning of a particular term in the vocabulary of language, and this book is an excellent place to turn for these answers. It usually provides a brief quotation from a leading linguist or grammarian to illustrate a term, and it is free from the worst sorts of ‘compiler’s bias’: it avoids both the tendency to have too many opinions and the paralysis of having none at all. This book will not teach anyone how to use or understand English, but it is one of my favourite collections of ways to talk about the language. |
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A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. H.W. Fowler. Reprint edition, 1984. Omega Books. 0-907853-92-7 These two books represent generally incompatible and widely separated approaches to talking about usage, but they both have a place on the reference shelf of any writer or editor. Fowler’s original thinking about his book will soon be a hundred years old, so no one should suppose it to be a source of advice on how to use contemporary English; but it is still one of the best examples we have of how to form and defend opinions about the language. Swan is a scrupulously fair and balanced observer; in general this is a good thing, but the resulting tendency to equivocate gets him into trouble from time to time. Fowler goes looking for trouble, and sometimes launches himself into soapbox oratory that entertains more than it instructs. Swan’s book and Fowler’s are both best for people who have already thought about the language in detail: well informed readers will be able to fill in the gaps Swan leaves out of fairness, and open up gaps Fowler will not allow to appear. Fowler sometimes frustrates because of what he omits or simply fails to care about; Swan is so remarkably comprehensive that I sometimes wonder if he included too much. Taken together, and even given Fowler’s clear understanding of what he will and will not tolerate, they form a useful and instructive descriptive grammar of English. 2002-05-25 |
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Date posted: 2003-09-15