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book reviews
good and bad English style booksreviewed by T. Nelson |
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book reviews
good and bad English style booksreviewed by T. Nelson |
Reviewed by T. Nelson
The best guide to evaluating a book is to remember the Golden Rule: A book’s quality is inversely proportional to the number of comments printed in the front that praise it. If it has one, it’s probably safe. If it has two, use caution. This one has thirty-two—six pages of them.
Most of what’s here is for writers of light fiction, and it’s the standard dull stuff, only more wishy-washy: follow the rule, he says, or don’t if you’d rather not. The author is living in a bubble which gives him a fake-sounding informality and prevents him from realizing that telling us how much he hates Trump isn’t actually a joke.
He tells fiction writers not to be too specific about numbers and informs them about the correct use of hyphens (“six-year olds” and “six year-olds” are wrong); subjunctive mood; and the rule about never starting a sentence with a ‘but.’
But overall it’s an ordinary ‘airplane’ book: buy it in the airport, read it on the plane, then toss it in the garbage. I much prefer H.W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (reviewed at right).
Both of the books on this page use real sentences, rather than contrived ones like “I will show you how to successfully stop splitting infinitives and using prepositions to end sentences with,” which is now a cliché.
jul 23 2026
Reviewed by T. Nelson
This book, written in 1926, is less a dictionary than an encyclopedic collection of words and questionable sentences, lovingly collected by the great schoolmaster, and then systematically ripped to shreds. The English language has changed since Fowler’s time, and some of his advice now seems quaint. But Fowler is still entertaining to read, and no one could ever accuse him of being wishy-washy.
If you read Fowler, get the original or second edition. Robert W. Burchfield has thoroughly bowdlerized the third edition. Burchfield’s adulterations to this classic work have earned both him and Oxford University Press much well-deserved scorn.
No one has ever bothered to re-typeset the first (and the only good) edition. My copy is so blurry as to be nearly unreadable. A slightly better copy of the second edition is available online at pdfroom.com. A “Butterfield” 4th edition of Fowler is available online but it has been “sensitively revised” even more—and we all know what that means.
What is changing? In the second edition, under ‘But,’ the sample ‘wrong’ sentence “How can Mr. Balfour tell but that two years hence he may not be tired of official life?” has been dropped. Many more example sentences have been dropped throughout the dictionary. For example, the entry under ‘illogicalities’ has been cut to about half its original length. In a few entries, e.g. ‘Ignoramus’ and ‘Frankenstein,’ new examples have been added.
Under ‘Mahomet, Mohammedan, etc.’ the original rant still stands:
The worst of letting the learned gentry bully us out of our traditional Mahometan and Mahomet (who ever heard of Mohammed and the mountain?) is this : no sooner have we tried to be good and learnt to say, or at least write, Mohammed than they are fired with zeal to get us a step or two further on the path of truth, which at present seems likely to end in Muhammad with a dot under the h; see DIDACTICISM, PRIDE OF KNOWLEDGE.
Under ‘Pride of Knowledge’ all the example words (including ‘Mahomet’) have been dropped, which is why only ‘Didacticism’ appears in the second edition.
Although I am no expert at knowing what editors these days do or do not find ‘offensive,’ most of the changes in the second edition don’t appear to be overtly political. Most consist of dropping Fowler’s wonderful example sentences and tidying up the English.
But not all. ‘Chinaman’ is now marked as ‘derogatory’ and there is a new entry called “Worsened Words,” where the new editor can no longer resist meddling. ‘Academic’ is becoming derogatory, he writes, “reflecting the view, widely held today, that acquiring knowledge is a waste of time unless it is a means of material advancement.” That might have been the reason in 1965 when Gowers was trying to revise it, but no longer. Institutions decline and the words that describe them fall at their side.
The changes are not as dramatic as the changes in A Chinese-English Dictionary (Han-Ying Cidian) between the 1979 and ‘revised’ 2001 editions, where most of the example sentences about mass slaughter by the People’s Liberation Army, e.g., “we wiped out eight million reactionary KMT troops” were dropped; but they are significant changes nevertheless, and they still detract.
oct 27, 2012; updated jul 24 2026