Posted by Tom Moertel
Wed, 19 Jul 2006 16:55:00 GMT
Note for coders: If you’re one of the fine folks who reads my blog for the
coding content, I’ll be up-front with you: this article represents
about 2,500 words of non-coding text. Nevertheless, you ought to
read it because I am writing about something that’s important to
you.
We coders, if you stop to think about it, spend our lives doing some
insanely complex and seemingly bizarre stuff. If we want the rest of
humanity to understand us and what we do, we must be prepared to
explain our world to them; they are not going to figure us out on
their own.
Thus the burden of making our world understandable and relevant to
others rests upon our own shoulders. To carry the burden, we must be
able to communicate complex ideas, share the full depth and beauty of
our creations, and help others to see that the things we devote our lives
to are worthy and fascinating. In sum, we need to invest in our
writing skills. Writing is still the most effective, scalable means
we humans have for capturing and sharing complex knowledge. If we
want to reach the rest of the world, we must become good writers.
Unfortunately, writing well is difficult. Like programming,
writing is a struggle. If you want to improve, you must struggle
often. (That’s why I blog.) And while I cannot struggle for you, I
can tell you about an unappreciated writing tool that has become my
go-to reference when writing. It has made my struggles a bit less
difficult and a bit more fun. That reference is not the ever-popular
dictionary.1
Rather, it is the usage guide.
Usage guides are designed to explain the finer points of using our
language and, if they’re good, they offer sensible advice. Have you
ever wondered whether to use affect or effect, compliment or
complement, farther or further, compose or comprise, less
or fewer, precede or proceed? Do you know why you shouldn’t
confuse enormity for enormousness, masterful for masterly, or
purposely for purposefully? How should you approach who and
whom? And how should you address the thorny issue of sexist
language? These are the kinds of questions that usage guides were
created to answer.
A good usage guide isn’t afraid to prescribe advice. Some more-recent
guides, however, are less prescriptive and more descriptive,
following the lead of modern dictionaries. Instead of offering advice
on tricky writing issues, these guides describe the many viewpoints in
play and let you choose among them. I think this weakens a guide, and
so my recommendations below are biased toward prescriptive guides.
Unlike dictionaries, usage guides are not plentifully stocked in book
stores. On a recent visit to my local Barnes & Noble, I was
disappointed to learn that the reference section contained no usage
guides at all. For this reason, I will provide Amazon links to the
guides I like.
Let us begin our tour of usage guides at the beginning, with Fowler.
Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage
Of the authors of usage guides, no one is more revered than Henry Watson Fowler. He and his brother Francis wrote
The
King’s English, a reference published in 1906 that provided lengthy advice on issues of style and grammar. Afterward, the brothers Fowler collaborated on their next major work, but in 1918, after eight years of planning, Francis died, leaving Henry alone with the daunting task of writing the book, which ultimately required another eight years. Published in 1926, this book was to become the influential masterwork,
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, most often called Fowler’s Modern English Usage or simply Fowler.
Since its publication, Fowler has become the
quintessential prescriptive guide to English usage and is still
beloved among picky writers. One can’t help but respect the author,
who doesn’t cower behind dry, academic language but instead throws
himself vividly onto every page and seems to go out of his way to
fight pedantry.
The followers of Fowler prize his precision but love him for his
quirky voice. When you read Fowler, you get Fowler.
Consider the first edition’s entry on superiority (remember, this
was written almost a century ago):
Superiority. Surprise a person of the
class that is supposed to keep servants cleaning his own boots, &
either he will go on with the job while he talks to you, as if it were
the most natural thing in the world, or else he will explain that the
bootboy or scullery-maid is ill & give you to understand that he is,
despite appearances, superior to boot-cleaning. If he takes the
second course, you conclude that he is not superior to it; if the
first, that perhaps he is. So it is with the various apologies (to
use an expressive colloquialism – if we may adopt the current
slang – . . . ) to which recourse is had by writers who wish to
safeguard their dignity & yet be vivacious, to combine comfort with
elegance, to touch pitch & not be defiled. They should make up their
minds whether their reputation or their style is such as to allow of their
dismounting from the high horse now & again without compromising
themselves; if they can do that at all, they can dispense with
apologies; if the apology is needed, the thing apologized for would be
better anyway. . . . (Fowler, 1st ed., 1926.)
The editors of Fowler’s later editions, to the
disappointment of Fowlerians everywhere, have muted Fowler’s voice
while undertaking the necessary work of making the reference more
accessible to contemporary readers and writers. For example, the
superiority entry from the 2nd edition, edited by Sir Ernest Gowers,
reads as follows:
Superiority. Much misplaced ingenuity in
finding forms of apology is shown by writers with a sense of their own
superiority who wish to safeguard their dignity and yet be vivacious,
to combine comfort with elegance, to touch pitch and not be defiled.
Among them are: To use and expressive colloquialism – in the
vernacular phrase – . . . . (Fowler, 2nd ed., 1965)
Most writers consider Gowers’s stewardship of Fowler completely
respectable. The second edition still speaks with Fowler’s voice, and
Gowers’s revisions make the work more practical for modern writers.
The second edition is seen in much the same light as the screenplay
adaption of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: the original was changed,
but the changes were understandably necessary and, most important, the
integrity of the original was largely preserved.
The third edition of Fowler, however, is the subject of controversy.
Edited by Robert W. Burchfield and published in 1996, The New
Fowler’s Modern English Usage differs from the previous editions
in two important respects. First, it no longer speaks with a
distinctly Fowlerian voice. Second, Burchfield allows descriptivism
to creep into the celebratedly prescriptive reference.
Nevertheless, it is a useful reference work. Even the third
edition’s detractors admit that it is a perfectly respectable, modern
usage guide. Their main complaint is that the work is no longer
Fowler, and I am inclined to agree. Burchfield distances
himself from Fowler, as the third edition’s entry on superiority
demonstrates:
Superiority. Fowler’s term for the use of a slang
expression or a socially divisive remark preceded by a distancing or
defensive comment implying that in normal circumstances the speaker
would not deign to use such an expression himself or herself. Such
distancing remarks include as they say;
if the word may be permitted; . . . .
(Fowler, 3rd ed., 1996)
Burchfield writes that superiority is “Fowler’s term,” putting
Fowler in the third person instead of adopting Fowler’s voice.
Instead of recommending a position – taking a stand – he tells you
what positions others have taken (in this case Fowler himself). He
observes and describes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this
approach, but in a usage guide, I prefer to know what the author
himself thinks.
I suspect that many of the third edition’s critics would have welcomed
the book had the Oxford University Press not used Fowler’s name in its
title. But the OUP did call it Fowler, and the reviewers judged it
accordingly. Nevertheless, the third edition is a worthy reference,
and I use it second only to Garner, which I will get to in a moment.
Because all three editions of Fowler have their proponents, all
three editions are still available today. The first edition was out
of print for some time (I found my copy, the original 1926
letterpress edition, at a book sale), but the third edition’s
awakening of the Fowlerian hordes led to renewed interest
in republishing the earlier versions. Now all three are
readily available:
Which version is for you? If you want an up-to-date, practical
reference, get the 3rd edition (or, better yet, get Garner,
discussed next). If you want less descriptivism and more of the
original Fowler flavor, get the 2nd edition instead. You probably
should not get the first edition unless you are fascinated by the
English language or want to experience the unadulterated, original
Fowler, in which case you are the kind of person who probably has
all three editions already.
Garner’s Modern American Usage
My favorite book on usage is Garner’s
Modern American Usage. Bryan Garner, a pragmatic
prescriptivist, has crafted an excellent usage guide of a distinctly
Fowlerian flavor. (That he also founded the H.W. Fowler Society
ought to tell you something about the way he approaches usage.)
In Garner, the detractors of the third edition of Fowler have found a
successor to Fowler in spirit. Where Burchfield describes, Garner
prescribes. Consider how the authors approach the subject of sexist
language. Burchfield writes:
sexist language. 1. As indicated in
numerous articles in this book . . ., feminists and others sympathetic
to their views, from about the 1970s onwards, have attacked what they
take to be male-favouring terminology of every kind and have scoured
the language for suitable evidence and for gender-free
substitutes. Their argument hinges on the belief that many traditional
uses of the language discriminate against women or render them
‘invisible’ and for these reasons are unacceptable. The various types
of alleged linguistic discrimination need not be repeated here.
Perhaps the most obvious reference works on the subject are
. . . . 2. Some landmarks. As rough indicators of the
development of feministic views on gender-free language it might be
useful to set down in chronological order details of some decisions
and discussions that have taken place in various English-speaking
countries since 1988: . . . .
(Fowler, 3rd ed., 1996)
Burchfield then devotes the next two subsections (3 and 4),
representing the balance of the full-page entry, to examples from both
sides of the debate and to describing the academic viewpoint on the
subject.
In contrast, Garner distills the problem to its essence
and offers practical advice:
SEXISM. A. Generally. If you start
with the pragmatic premise that you want to avoid misleading or
distracting your readers, then you’ll almost certainly conclude that
it’s best to avoid sexist language. Regardless of your political
persuasion, that conclusion seems inevitable – if you’re a
pragmatist.
But does avoiding sexism mean resorting to awkward
devices such as he/she? Surely not, because that too would distract
many readers. What you should strive for instead – if you want readers
to focus on your ideas and not on the political subtext – is a style
that doesn’t even hint at the issue. So unless you’re involved in a
debate about sexism, you’ll probably want a style, on the one hand,
that no reasonable person could call sexist, and on the other hand,
that never suggests you’re contorting your language to be
nonsexist.
(Garner, 2nd ed., 2003)
Garner then goes on to provide two pages of practical suggestions:
B. The Pronoun Problem. . . .
C. Words with man- and -man. . . .
D. Differentiated Feminine Forms. . . .
E. Equivalences. . . .
F. Statute of Limitations. . . .
(Garner, 2nd ed., 2003)
Garner also provides a bibliography (subsection G) should you
wish “to inquire further into this interesting subject.”
Most of the differences between Garner and Fowler 3 are
not so pronounced. Either reference would serve the needs of
most writers. Nevertheless, I find myself reaching
for Garner first and then, if I want a second opinion, for Fowler 3.
So my top choice is Garner.
This ends my brief tour of usage guides. I have overlooked
many useful guides, such as Merriam Webster’s, but
I don’t find them as useful as Garner or Fowler.
If you happen to be in a good library, prowl the reference
section and draw your own conclusions.
My advice: if you don’t have a usage guide, get one and use it
If you care about writing enough to own and use a dictionary, you
probably ought to have a good usage guide, too. While there are many
usage guides available, if you can have only one, my recommendation
would be for Garner’s
Modern American Usage. If you are the kind of person who likes
the luxury of a second opinion, complement Garner with The
New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 3rd ed. (Paperback) (or 3rd
revised ed. in Hardcover). Finally, if you want to experience
Fowler unaltered, pick up a copy of the first
edition of Fowler. If you find it at a book sale, you might
be able to score a copy of the original 1926 printing.
Even if you don’t want to buy a usage guide, you ought to sign up for
Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day. Every day you’ll receive an emailed
tip from Garner and maybe a quotation or two on writing. Sign up
at the
OUP’s email-subscription
page.
I prefer printed reference books, but if you would rather get your
usage information online, here are a couple of starting points:
There you have it: the usage guide – my favorite writing tool. If I
haven’t convinced you to add one to your own writing toolkit, at least
flip through Garner or Fowler the next time you’re in the
library. Maybe then you’ll reconsider. For me, usage guides are a
no-brainer: anything that makes writing a bit more fun and a bit less
of a struggle is worth having on my bookshelf.
Because dictionary publishers have made the
dictionary-and-thesaurus duo a part of every college
freshman’s standard gear, I will assume that you already have a
good dictionary and so focus my attention exclusively on
usage guides. If I’m wrong about this, I can recommend my favorite dictionary, The New Oxford American Dictionary. (Please do not bother to inform me that the NOAD is inferior to The Shorter OED because if that’s the way you roll, you clearly don’t need my advice.) Another good choice is Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition.
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Tags fowler, meu, usage, writing
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Wed, 01 Mar 2006 20:17:00 GMT
While we read, our minds subconsciously correct mistakes and overlook omissions in the steam of words we see, especially when reading familiar texts. This mental feature, which allows us to skim long documents, has a nasty drawback when we are writing: it makes it our own mistakes harder to spot.
One of the most common writing mistakes that our brains stealthily correct is the the duplicate word problem. For example, I inserted a double the into the previous sentence. Did you catch it?
If so, don’t be too proud of your accomplishment. It is easier to see errors in others’ writing than in your own. Your brain is attuned to your natural writing patterns and much more likely to repair your mistakes without your knowing.
To overcome this problem, some writers recommend reading your work backward, but I think computers are a more practical solution.
Here’s the Perl script that I use to spot duplicate words:
#!/usr/bin/perl -n00
# dupwords.pl - find duplicate words in the input stream
print "$ARGV: para $.: ($1)\n"
while /(\b(\w+)\b\s+\b\2\b)/sg;
I use this script from Emacs via shell-command-on-region. I also use it from the command line to find duplicate-word errors in batch:
find . -name '*.txt' | xargs dupwords.pl
The duplicate-words problem is a favorite for programming cookbooks, so if you don’t like my recipe (or Perl), you have many other options.
Posted in perl, writing
Tags perl, tools, writing
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