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Category Archives: usage guide
Evaluating Writing Wrongs?
This summer, walking into Foyles in London, I came across this usage guide: Writing Wrongs: Common Errors in English, by Robert M. Martin (2018, Peterborough Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press). New for me, but already four years old, so I was … Continue reading
More usage guides
If the coincidence Robin Straaijer experienced last week was finding a usage guide ten years after he had been working on it, mine was to find a copy of a German usage guide, the German usage I’ve been told, just … Continue reading
Usage guides and the complaint tradition
If you wish to attend this presentation, on Wednesday 27 April at 2 pm (CET), here is the zoomlink: https://uni-due.zoom.us/j/66210477258?pwd=R0ZOc1RNTXcvUkxuYUVsNXlCSWFiZz09. We hope to see many of you there. And if students need a certificate of attendance, the organisers will will … Continue reading
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Usage guides… there’s no getting away from them!
Yesterday, I found this well-worn copy of Margaret Nicholson’s A Dictionary of American-English Usage (Signet 1958) in my local street library (see photo below) just around the corner of where I live. I realised that it has been just about … Continue reading
Posted in usage guide
Tagged fowler, HUGE, Oxford University Press, publication history, Signet, usage guides
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A new usage guide! Buy one, get one free
Harry Ritchie, the author of the amazing and important book English for the Natives (2013), has just published two new books, e-books this time. They’re called The Secret Passwords of Middle-Class Grammar and The Real Rules – A Quick Guide. … Continue reading
Geoffrey Nunberg, Robert Lowth and punctuation theory
Working on the punctuation practice of 18th-century letter writers, I was intrigued by the title of Geoffrey Nunberg‘s book, The Linguistics of Punctuation (1990). The book didn’t have what I was looking for, was in fact more about developing a … Continue reading
On their way home
Many thanks for letting them stay with us, Kate! It was good to be able to hold them (and to see how small some of them are!).
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Describing Prescriptivism
Soon to appear (expected publication date: some time in September):
Posted in announcement, news, usage features, usage guide
Tagged Describing prescriptivism
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Hen and hun in Dutch. Or: How to Make a Usage Problem Go Away
This is Amos van Baalen’s second blogpost for last semester’s MA course Non-Standard English: Modern Dutch technically does not have a case system anymore. Remnants of this system occur in many set expressions, such as te allen tijde “at all … Continue reading
Posted in usage features, usage guide
Tagged hun/hen, Onze Taal, Wouter van Wingerden
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A centenary: The Elements of Style
Putting the final touches (I hope!) to my book on usage guides and usage problems, I suddenly realised that William Strunk‘s famous Elements of Style is a hundred years old this year. Will anyone, publisher or critic or otherwise, pay attention to … Continue reading