Perfect Written English
‘I thoroughly enjoyed your Perfect Written English, and have it up on my shelf with Strunk and White, Gower, and Truss.’
David Baillieu, reader, via email
‘It's written in plain English, is perfectly organised to lead you through the complexities that make up good creative writing, and also has a sprinkling of humour, which makes it a pleasure to work through. I thoroughly recommend this book.’
Julie Biddle on amazon.co.uk
This is simple handbook to writing good, clear English. It’s based on courses I have given over the years.
I start with the very basics: ‘parts of speech’ and parsing – things I learnt at school and find to my surprise are no longer taught (in the UK, anyway. When teaching, I often found that people from places like India or Singapore had a much better grasp of them than people educated here.) This is, I feel, a serious omission, so I hope that my book will give readers the grounding in these essential concepts that schools don’t seem to provide any longer.
We move on to punctuation. Obviously, Lynne Truss has given this a good working over, so people are now more aware of it. However there are still huge errors made in places where they shouldn’t be… I take a slightly less dogmatic view of the rules than Lynne does – but only slightly.
A chapter on grammar follows. Rather than go into the subject in depth – huge volumes can be written about it – I point out a few common areas of error or doubt. My favourite of these is the ‘dangling participle’, the old ‘cycling along a bush path, a leopard jumped out at me’ classic. (If you don’t know what’s wrong with that, the ‘buy the book’ button is opposite…)
There’s then a slightly catch-all chapter on things like spelling and avoiding gender bias, then we get to what is for me the heart of the book, the chapter on ‘Flow and its enemies’. Flow is that lovely state you get into when being led through a piece of well-written prose (or listening to a beautiful piece of music, or even driving along an empty lochside road in the Highlands…) Its three great enemies are ambiguity, repetition and jargon. If you read only this chapter, and take these three monsters out of your work, you will be well ahead of most non-professional writers.
I then talk about how to make writing lively, and how to structure sentences and paragraphs. Sentence structure is particularly important to good writing. How many reports suffer from unreadable sentences groaning under the weight of subordinate clauses or strings of ‘ands’? Many, I’m afraid. There is also material about emphasis in sentences – where do you put the information that people have to know, and where do you put the rest?
Two chapters on ‘Getting it done’ follow, one on ‘audience, planning and structure’ and the other on the actual process of drafting, revising (etc.) Some comments on specific writing situations, such as email and sales letters, wrap the whole thing up.
One thing I apologize for is the title, which is there because the book came out as part of a series instead of (as hoped) a standalone book. ‘Perfect Written English’ is perhaps impossible, or maybe only flows from the pens of Shakespeare, Gibbon, Churchill or whoever else you choose to elect to the pantheon. It is not something I would ever claim either to produce or teach. Good, clear written English – that’s good enough for me, and this book will help you produce it.
