Current English Usage [antikvár]

NTRODUCTION The aim of this boolc is a practical one: to provide an easy work of reference for those who wish to write good English. The entries deal with points of grammar, punctuation, style, idiom, spelling and modern usage generally. As the focus of the book is on good written English, pronunciation has not been dealt with. Given the wide range of the book's subject matter, it is obviously impossible to be comprehensive. Indeed, there is no attempt to be so, for a comprehensive treatment of grammar would turn this handbook into a fully-iiedged grammar book, and a comprehensive treatment of vocabulary would turn it into a dictionary. The entries have been selected in the light of the difficulty they oiTer to the learner. The selection has been made on the basis of the author's and revisers' considerable teaching experience in England and overseas, on the basis of reference to many other authorities' publications on usage, and on the basis of the mistakes actually made in a wide variety of written sources. We are also very grateful to the friends who have passed on to us common confusions of their pupils or who have commented on parts of the manuscript. The entries, then, come from a wide range of sources, but they can never hope to be complete. Further suggestions will always be welcomed. It is worth pointing out that a work of this nature is necessarily prescriptive. The aim is to give guidance as to what is accepted as good written English by educated users of the language. Our task was not that of the hnguist - simply to record what people do - but rather to give a faithful account of what people consider standard written English to be. The question of standard is important since the labels 'correct' and 'incorrect' only make sense in relation to a norm. What is Standard English? To find out, you might look up the entry Standard English where we have narrowly defined it as prose (not verse); it is neutral in style (not very formal or informal); it is non-specialist in subject matter (to avoid the technical vocabularies' of law, engineering, etc); it is contemporary (not the standards of earlier ui