Question:
I'm after a good English text book that I can study at home in my
spare time to better my English in speech, writing, and grammar. I
don't want to be a writer, I just want to be able to express myself
better.
English is my native language, and my English is OK, but I would like
to get it to a top level so I can be confident with my English. I'm
just starting university/college by the way (computer course).
For example, it's annoying when you don't know exactly when to use a
semi-colon or em-dash, or whether a comma is superfluous, etc.
I guess they key is learning all those grammatical terms and vocab.
Then you can grasp the rules & structure. Gee, it wasn't that long ago
that I had to look up what a verb was to refersh my memory.
Can anyone recommend a good text book.
Answer:
f you want one book to cover the key points, I recommend the
aptly titled _Simple & Direct_ by Jacques Barzun; the title can
be taken to describe the results wanted or to describe Barzun's
own elegant writing. A second book of worth in the
"all-in-one" category is Sir Ernest Gowers' _The Complete Plain
Words_ ("complete" because it was originally published as two
books). Beyond those, you move to specialized books--those
that deal primarily with one aspect of language use, grammar,
usage, style.
For a very thorough grammar reference that can also be used as
a learning tool, I much recommend George O. Curme's _English
Grammar_; hardcovers are expensive, but used paperback editions
may be had very inexpensively. It's pretty much _the_ grammar
reference.
For usage, there are many good books, though most feel that the
four chief ones are Fowler's _Modern English Usage_ (the
original first edition is available quite inexpensively,
Wordsworth publishing a nice version), so long as you avoid the
poisonous rape called the "third edition," by a rapist named
Burchfield; next chronologically is _The Careful Writer_ by
Theodore Bernstein, long with _The new York Times_; then there
is Wilson Follett's _Modern American Usage_ which, despite the
title, is of general utility to any English speaker (avoid the
late revision by Eric Wensberg); and, most recent, from 1998,
Bryan Garner's _Dictionary of Modern American Usage_ (also of
use to any English speaker).
Style--the mechanical things of writing--varies considerably
with location (there are, for one example, sharp difference
between American and British styles in punctuation in
quotations), so you might want to ask locally, perhaps at a
library, what people use. In the U.S., the commonest resource
is _The Chicago Manual of Style_, which is fairly pricey in
late editions.
If you are not yet aware of it, there is a great split in the
English-speaking world between two thoughts of school on
language: the prescriptive, that holds that, while language can
and will (and, to some extent, should) shift with time, at any
moment there are rules and such things as right and wrong (or,
gasp, good and bad) forms and uses; and the descriptive, which
holds that whatever you can hear down at the corner bar is good
English just because you can hear it down at the corner bar.
(Of course, descriptivists will now post in their usual state
of apoplexy to "explain" why those statements are "untrue.")
Chacun a son gout, but you do seem to be interested in what
careful writers and speakers mean by "sound English."
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