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The English language : A user's guide

The English Language : A User's Guide

Jack Lynch

2008 • 978-1-58510-185-6 • paper • 256 pages •  6x9  •  $12.95

A highly popular writing guide, originally online, now available in book form. Entries are arranged alphabetically and are written in a highly readable and engaging tone.

| About the Authors | Table of Contents | Preface | Review

Online companion here

 Description                                             

Updated and expanded from one of the most popular grammar sites on the web, this book provides a modern guide to English usage for the 21st century. With topics arranged alphabetically and written in an enjoyable and readable tone, The English Language: A User’s Guide will help students and writers understand the nature of the language, explaining the "why" of the rules as well as what constitutes good grammar and style. Going beyond the prescriptive wrong /right examples, Jack Lynch includes examples of weak/strong, good/better, disputed/preferred, and informal/formal usage.

Also included:

• Introductory Essay

• Using This Guide

• A Guide to Citation

• Additional Readings

 Author                                                     

Jack Lynch is Associate Professor at Rutgers University, Newark. He is the author of an edition of Samuel Johnson’s great English dictionary, a new highly regarded and nationally reviewed work on Shakespeare, and other recent and forthcoming books on English literature.

 Table of Contents                                      

Introduction

      Using This Guide

      Acknowledgments

The Guide

Appendix : A Guide to Citation

Additional Reading

 From the Introduction                              

I’ve written this little book because I hope it offers three things that aren’t found in most other writing guides. The first has to do with the scope of the coverage: I include entries because (1) real people want advice on these topics, and (2) it’s possible to offer useful advice on them in a paragraph or two. If a topic doesn’t fit both criteria, I don’t bother with it here. I could have produced a much longer guide, covering hundreds of other topics, but many questions have never come up in all the years I’ve been teaching writing. Other problems are common, but are almost impossible to discuss in a guide like this: on matters like the sequence of tenses or verbal parallelism, I could write page after page without helping anyone. (Besides, readers who know enough to look in a guide for "sequence of tenses" don’t need this guide.) So I’ve limited my advice to topics that actually challenge real writers, and that can be addressed briefly.

The second reason for this book has to do with its tone and style. Too many guides are written—no, I take that back; written is too grand a word—too many guides are compiled by committees, no doubt on sound pedagogical principles and guided by the best-practices thinking of some organization or other. And textbook purchasers tend to favor the safe choices; books that never offend and never challenge their readers are the ones that do well in the market. The results, though, are too often unreadable. There are honorable exceptions—writing guides I admire fill several shelves in my study—but there aren’t enough of them, and they rarely end up in the right hands. A handbook made up of limp commonplaces rendered in flabby prose can’t help being counterproductive, because it never shows that reading and writing can be enjoyable. Instead it teaches students to efface themselves from their writing, leaving no personal voice at all. I have no patience with that sort of thing, and it was my distaste for the blandness of so many other guides that led me to write this informal and playful handbook. I don’t pretend every sentence in here is a gem, but at least I’ve tried to let a human voice come through. I hope the result is more readable than the pabulum served up by many other textbook writers.

The third thing I try to accomplish in this guide is the most important, but the hardest to describe: instead of making authoritative declarations on what’s right and wrong, I want to help readers to make up their own minds about the difficult questions. For two decades I’ve been paid to correct other people’s writing, and it’s often a thankless job. It’s never pleasant to tell people about their mistakes, and the task becomes much more complicated when there are no clearly accepted standards of why some mistakes are considered mistakes. When a math teacher marks something wrong on an algebra test or when a chemistry teacher says a student failed to balance a chemical equation, it’s obvious what they mean. But writing doesn’t work that way: linguistic wrongness comes in many varieties, and when I correct someone’s prose I have to take all those varieties into consideration. Sometimes I fix unambiguous mistakes—garden-variety typos, straightforward errors of grammar, unambiguously wrong word choices. Sometimes I suggest that something is controversial—hopefully, say, or a singular data—and, while it’s not necessarily wrong, many readers will be distracted by it. Sometimes I think a sentence is filled with padding, words like basically and quite that contribute nothing. Sometimes I note that the style is a little less formal than I think appropriate for the situation. And sometimes I simply think a good sentence could be better if we moved this word over there, or traded this word for that. In a typical paper I might make dozens of such corrections and suggestions, and I always want to explain why I make the changes I do. How, though, to indicate what each correction means? Margins are only so wide, and there’s room for only so much scribbling.

Most writing guides do a lousy job of explaining why. They reduce everything to thumbs-up or thumbs-down, yea or nay, permitted or forbidden—with a great many things listed as forbidden-and-don’t-you-dare-ask-why. To judge from some textbooks, you’d think an angel dies every time someone dangles a participle. Small wonder, then, that people come to treat grammar and usage as matters of superstition. But it’s important to understand what these so-called "rules" mean, which ones are really rules and which ones are just tips. Until you know why to avoid the passive voice, or why to use (or avoid) the serial comma, you’ll have a hard time putting the rules into action—they seem like a huge and arbitrary collection of thou-shalt-nots.

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