Category Archives: usage guide

Evaluating Writing Wrongs?

Posted on August 12, 2022 by Ingrid Tieken

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 →

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More usage guides

Posted on April 23, 2022 by Ingrid Tieken

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 →

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Usage guides and the complaint tradition

Posted on April 20, 2022 by Ingrid Tieken

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!

Posted on April 15, 2022 by Robin Straaijer

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 →

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A new usage guide! Buy one, get one free

Posted on February 3, 2022 by Ingrid Tieken

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 →

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Geoffrey Nunberg, Robert Lowth and punctuation theory

Posted on November 1, 2021 by Ingrid Tieken

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 →

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On their way home

Posted on March 5, 2020 by Ingrid Tieken

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

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Ingrid Tieken

Soon to appear (expected publication date: some time in September):  

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Hen and hun in Dutch. Or: How to Make a Usage Problem Go Away

Posted on July 25, 2018 by Ingrid Tieken

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 →

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A centenary: The Elements of Style

Posted on April 12, 2018 by Ingrid Tieken

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 →

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