Category Archives: usage guide

How careful can you be …

Posted on January 22, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

I’m going through the final chapter of Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style (2014) to find out how many old chestnuts he discusses in his overview of usage problems. I’m always hoping to find new chestnuts, so we’ll wait and see. Of … Continue reading →

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The first American usage guide

Posted on November 26, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

In the post today: my copy of Seth T. Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector, the first American usage guide, published in 1847, and found on ebay. It is in better condition than the ebay picture suggested: it has a green cover, and a … Continue reading →

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An 18th-century Garner?

Posted on November 7, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Within this project, we take Robert Baker’s Reflections on the English Language (1770) to be the first English usage guide. But was it? In the introduction to the Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage (1989: 8a) we are able to read … Continue reading →

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Steven Pinker’s Sense of Usage

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Robin Straaijer

Last month, Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style was published in Britain and the US. As a specialist on books of usage advice, and as someone who needs to write for a living, I find The Sense of Style interesting because it … Continue reading →

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Merriam Webster’s lexicographers

Posted on August 12, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

The Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage (1989) is unusual among the usage guides I have seen in that the work isn’t by a single author, such as Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) or Kingley Amis’s The King’s English (1997). The work … Continue reading →

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Usage guides and the Book Club Associates

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Yesterday, I wrote a post about my discovery of Harry Blamires’s usage guide, called The Cassell Guide to Common Errors in English (1998). The publisher is mentioned as BCA, which as I now know, thanks to Tim Waller, stands for Book Club … Continue reading →

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Who is Harry Blamires?

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

There, I’ve done it again: I found another usage guide at our local (Dutch!) charity shop Het Warenhuis. How did the book end up in the Netherlands? There is no ownership inscription unfortunately, so we won’t know who the former … Continue reading →

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Bennett’s Wordfinder

Posted on July 31, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

This is an index to the second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, based on the version revised by Sir Ernest Gowers (1965). Paul Bennett has written elsewhere on this blog, about Fowler’s humour. Why need an index to a work that … Continue reading →

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Want to write like a spy?

Posted on July 10, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

It appears that even the CIA has a style guide. A secret one no less, one that got leaked moreover, according to The Guardian Online yesterday. The Guardian article tells us that the style guide includes well-known “old chestnuts”  like uninterested/disinterested, … Continue reading →

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The Fourth of July and 500 Mistakes of Daily Occurrence

Posted on July 4, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

Since it is the fourth of July today, I might perhaps draw on the possibility that many people will be Googling for “Independence Day” or indeed “the fourth of July” to invoke their help in identifying a reference. I’ve already … Continue reading →

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