The Complete Plain Words by Ernest Gowers, 0141014520, Lowest Book Price Finder

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A useful book, but for a specialised readership

First of all: if you are someone who hasn't read a lot of books about the English language, but you have to do a fair amount of writing in your daily life and you feel that you need help with grammar and punctuation, this book is probably not for you.

Gowers' original book was written in the late 1940s and early 1950s, mainly for use by civil servants who were already highly educated but who needed reminding that they were supposed to be servants of the public, not masters. Gowers' advice is mostly about cleaning up bad and pretentious English, not about basic points of style and usage for people who just don't know how to put a sentence together. If you want a useful book which will tell you things like where to put the full stop in a sentence that ends with a quote, then you need a good style guide. The best one for my money is the Oxford University Press 'New Hart's Rules', an excellent handbook of guidelines on basic usage, clarity and good plain style. Alternatively, you could get Fowler's 'Modern English Usage' but the current edition of it (edited by Robert Burchfield) is somewhat controversial, and previous editions, though fascinating, are a bit out of date. 'New Hart's Rules' covers the same ground but is shorter and more handy for everyday use.

'The Complete Plain Words' is a different sort of book from any of the above, and is really intended for people who already think they know how to write. It's extremely good at clearing up common confusions in the minds of educated people, such as the distinctions between 'abrogate' and 'arrogate', or 'comprise' and 'compose' (or, for that matter, the specific difference between 'comprise' and 'include'.) If this is not the kind of thing you are looking for, then you probably need 'New Hart's Rules' or Fowler. Everybody else needs them too, but this book is actually a fairly specialised guide to writing official English, and is aimed at people who do that for a living.

For those people, Gowers is a great and enlightening read. My own copy of the book is the second edition, edited by his great successor Sir Bruce Fraser, and apart from its value as a guide to good usage it's an interesting snapshot of the state of English in the early 1970s, when Fraser carried out his revision. It's also wise, witty and full of fascinating examples of what the author and editor considered good as well as bad English.

There is a current fad for correctness in language, of which the bestselling example is probably Lynne Truss' book 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves'. It has been hyped as a useful and accessible guide to correct English (or at any rate, correct punctuation). I haven't read it, though, for two reasons: one is that a quick flick through the book revealed that it didn't contain anything that wasn't already in any of the books mentioned above, which I already own; and the other is that if I were looking for someone to teach me about how to write clear and unpretentious English, I certainly wouldn't go to a journalist.

To sum up: if you feel lost writing English and want to know how to avoid basic mistakes, get 'New Hart's Rules' or Fowler's 'Modern English Usage'. If you feel like you know how to write but find it difficult to make your meaning clear, get them anyway, but also get this.

Fantastic little book

I first read this book cover-to-cover, like a novel. It is interesting, easy to read and entertaining. It also covers a LOT of ground without being complicated or long-winded.

I bought this book in the late 90s and I still refer to it regularly. It's a fantastic little reference book. It explains things very clearly, and the examples it uses are very helpful indeed.

Its index is great; you can find what you're looking for very quickly.

It's refreshing to read a book about English usage which reflects our times and stresses the importance of clarity and elegance over blind adherence to Latin-based rules (e.g. it takes a sensible and pragmatic approach to the splitting of infinitives and to sentences ending with prepositions), but which at the same time doesn't do any "dumbing down" - everything it recommends is firmly rooted in good grammar and educated, clear use of the language.

This book was first published 52 years ago, but it has been updated to keep it current. In my opinion it is the best book you can buy if you want a clear, concise, sensible guide to writing well.

Oh - and the section on verbo-pomposity is a hoot!

AVOIDING CATACHRESIS

'Catachresis' is a simple Greek word meaning 'misuse'. If you had never come across it in English before, neither had I until I read it in the second chapter of this book, where it is displayed proudly in the course of a lesson to us on the correct use of the word 'jargon'. The first edition of the book appeared in 1948, and it has reappeared in at least 5 revisions and reprints, my own copy dating from 1964. It must have sold well in that case, and while it purports to be trying to teach the British civil service how to write clearly, the author soon forgets this limited aim and treats us to yet another enthusiastic handbook on the proper use of English, a field I had thought well and truly ploughed and reploughed by Fowler, Quiller-Couch, A P Herbert and others. This is how it will have been read by its eager public, and so this is how it should be assessed. Half a century is not nearly long enough for such a work to go out of date, but of course a lot of the interest in reading it today is precisely in seeing how well it has stood the test of so many years, particularly in the age of email. However I found it even more interesting from a sociological viewpoint. 'Who's talking?' I kept asking myself. Who feels like pontificating in print on this subject, and why should the rest of us take any notice?

We can forget the ostensible objective. Who on earth supposes that the language of the civil service is even trying to be clear much of the time? Whitehall mandarins write memos designed in the main to cover their rear, just as commercial executives do. When clarity is really their aim, it is perfectly compatible with lumpish expression, bad grammar, bad syntax, bad spelling and bad handwriting. The best-crafted English in the world will not make what they say unambiguous in a court of law, as is memorably shown by the story of the use of cleaning-rags 'in shops and places other than shops'. You, I and they might have thought that covered all possibilities, but not according to the judge who ruled that a mobile ice-cream tricycle was not a place. This book is really just another guide to good English, for the general public. As such, it is intelligent, balanced, stylish, clear and good-humoured. Gowers is neither pedantic nor unduly tolerant of shoddy writing. He understands that a language is a living thing, and he does his best to judge which neologisms are part of the organic development of the language and which are pimples and warts that could do with removing. Any educated reader with an ear for the language and a love of the language could probably do as well as he does, and I wonder what he would have made of the use of 'rendition' in 2005. I feel he is wasting his breath with his complaints about philosophers' idiom at the start of chapter 8 - philosophers have to write they way they do, just as lawyers have to. Checking his tastes against my own, I find us largely in agreement. I shall go to my final reckoning innocent of using 'anticipate' to mean 'expect', or 'aftermath' to mean 'outcome'. On the other hand I think he overdoes his objection to 'feasible' in the sense of 'plausible', and I can't see that 'the troops were issued with rations' is any worse than 'the troops were given rations', but I shall correct my use of 'comprise' in future in accordance with his strictures. I also agree that brevity makes for clarity, but it has its pitfalls too, as in a recipe that told me 'remove dish from oven and stand on a hot plate', or as in the exam question 'What can be said with confidence about...?' which got the answer 'Anything. Just say it with confidence'. And I wondered during chapter 8 whether the author was familiar with the term 'agglutinative', which gives respectability to expressions consisting entirely of nouns, e.g. 'city dockside warehouse fire'.

Who's telling us all this anyhow? It's not just Ernest Gowers, it's Sir Ernest Gowers. Anyone using his title like this invites derision. Did his wife say to him at breakfast 'Would you like more toast, Sir Ernest?', or perhaps, in those tender intimate moments, 'That was wonderful, Sir Ernest, how was it for you?' The whole attitude underlying the book is a memorial of an era when Whitehall was the High Indaba of the British establishment. Future Sir Ernests took firsts in classics at Cambridge, joined the civil service and were later appointed to chair the Coal Mines Reorganisation Commission (later the Coal Commission) and similar. They were the mandarin administrators of Clement Attlee's socialist commonwealth of Britain and they lived by the gospel of Whitehall Knows Best. They recruited and assessed their successors in the manner of wine-experts judging a grand cru, and they brought a similar fastidiousness to their style of writing. Clarity was important mainly for giving them a criterion in criticising the writing of other civil servants, what really mattered was a special elevated style, or what they took for such a style. Out of hours they wrote, and - worse - read, articles and letters of dumbfounding pomposity in The Times newspaper expounding this or that nicety in the use of English. They were clever men (mainly), they were upright and dedicated men, they were highly educated men, but the mystery to me in retrospect is why equally educated members of the general public ever took seriously the pretensions of any chairman of the Coal Mines Reorganisation Commission (later the Coal Commission) to special expertise in the use of English. If I had at any stage been the boss of the future Sir Ernest on his way up and had caught him wrestling with The Choice of Words or such like preoccupations in His Majesty's time and at the taxpayer's expense, I think my own words to him would have been a model of the clarity he values so highly, and they would have been 'Get on with what you're paid to do'.

Confused words

I bought this book on the strength of the previous reviews. I wanted to improve my grammar & punctuation. After starting to read some of this book I became even more confused. Don't buy this book unless you already have a very strong foundation in grammar & punctuation.

Valuable lessons entertainingly delivered

The premise of this book is that writing is a tool that should enable communication and minimize misunderstandings, not a tool with which to show-off learning. This premise shines out in every chapter as the author deals with: choosing the correct word, avoiding superfluous words, arranging words well, and punctuating clearly.

This is not a strict grammar with definitive statements on the split infinitive or the use of hyphens, it is a council of commonsense, filled with examples of poor English (often very funny ones), and suggestions for how they should be improved.. The result is a fantastic and valuable guide to how to write better.

I learnt a lot from this book and enjoyed reading it cover to cover. It also has an excellent index making it a useful reference work. Now all I have to do is learn how to put these great lessons into practise.

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