Grammar Guides to the Ever-Changing English Language

         A classic of English Grammar is certainly agreed to be by Sir Ernest Gowers who wrote a book meant only for civil servants called Plain Words first published in 1948. He then wrote An ABC of Plain Words, and in 1954 produced an amalgam of both called The Complete Plain Words, that has been in print ever since. He also wrote the revised Second Edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage (W.).

    For up-to-date information about American grammar, I recommend the excellent online blog called Grammar Girl by Mignon Fogarty. For further reading, there is the Strunk and White classic, Elements of Style, but it was first published in 1918 now with a foreword by Roger Angell. Editors currently usually refer to The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Ed. and others listed in the righthand column.

        Thanks to Google Books, it's now possible to see a leading book about English grammar that has been influential for a hundred years. "The Queen's English: Stray Notes on Speaking and Spelling" was first published in 1864 by the Dean of Canterbury Henry Alford D.D. In 2014 the dated anachronisms are amusing. 

        If you enjoy thinking about grammatical points and most writers do, this is another thoughtful book to add to your repertoire. For example, in case you're wondering whether to use "center" or "centre" (the latter being perfectly acceptable) and "ize" or "ise" (open questions), here's a book to peruse. "Talent" was a "newspaper word" according to Coleridge, and is a noun not a verb. 

        Dictionaries I often refer to were printed in Oxford such as The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED now online), and The Oxford-Duden Pictorial English Dictionary, but in a pinch, I'll just go ahead and Google, especially for Americanisms. 

          An article by John Preston in the Daily Telegraph about jargon called "Will Jargon Be The Death Of The English Language" is also useful to bring us up-to-date on British grammar. It makes the point that if responders couldn't understand the victims of London's bombing raid in 2005, then perhaps there is room for more agreement in the language. Amen.

Keep Writing