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
For readers of this blog and those who have followed the debate between prescriptivists and descriptivists closely, it’s hardly surprising to hear that Geoffrey Pullum, Professor of General Linguistics at Edinburgh University, is not particularly fond of William Strunk’s The … Continue reading
Here is one example of the effect which following up on Strunk and White’s linguistic advice may have (see last week’s blog post on this): He spent a considerable portion of 1802 in Nellore collecting manuscripts, interviewing local Brahmins whom … Continue reading
I don’t always read the Dutch writer Pia de Jong’s weekly column from the US in our paper, but last night, turning over the NRC, my eye was immediately drawn to the words Elements of Style: Strunk and White in NRC-Handelsblad, … Continue reading
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
The creation of a database of English usage guides and usage problems: the Hyper Usage Guide of English, or HUGE-database, is one of the sub-projects within Bridging the Unbridgeable. It is the first database to combine more than two hundred years of usage advice … Continue reading
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This was the question asked on the page-a-day calendar published by Genootschap Onze Taal for 4 June 2004. The answer is, obviously, not the same for English as it is for Dutch. The most successful Dutch usage manual, Onze Taal … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 