Jose Carillo's Forum

READINGS IN LANGUAGE

This section features links to interesting, instructive, or thought-provoking readings about the English language and related disciplines. The selections could be anywhere from light and humorous to serious and scholarly, and they range widely from the reading, writing, listening, and speaking disciplines to the teaching and learning of English.

Clear, honest English more than just a matter of right and wrong

Clear, honest use of English is more than just a matter of right and wrong, and is definitely not just dogged adherence to grammar rules that have no real basis and that only get in the way of fluent, unambiguous communication. This is the central argument of For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man’s Quest for Grammatical Perfection (Guardian Faber, 300 pages), a newly released book on English usage by David Marsh, veteran British journalist and current production editor of the Guardian of UK.

For Who the Bell Tolls

Marsh says that no single register of English is right for every occasion. For instance, he explains, what’s correct in a tweet might not be so in an essay, and that while updating one’s status on Facebook is instinctive for anyone who can read and write to a basic level, formal communication has usage conventions that are more complex and harder to grasp. One’s lack of awareness of or disregard for this difference results in the sloppy, chaotic syntax not only of some journalists but of many politicians, business and marketing people, government employees, and academics. Marsh then makes an incisive but jaunty discussion of the 10 English-usage things that he says people worry about too much but really shouldn’t, such as split infinitives, subjunctive usage, stranded prepositions, and double negatives.

And as to the misshapen-sounding title of his book, Marsh has this say: “When John Donne wrote ‘for whom the bell tolls’ and Bo Diddley [the late American R&B vocalist, guitarist, songwriter, and rock and roll pioneer] asked ‘who do you love?’ who was right—Donne or Diddley? The answer is both of them. It goes back to formal and informal registers. Bo’s got a cobra snake for a necktie. Not the kind of guy, I suggest, who would say something wussy like ‘whom do you love?’…The relaxed tone we prefer these days makes ‘whom’ increasingly optional, unlike in Donne’s day. The elegant formality of his prose has an eloquence and resonance that ‘for who the bell tolls’ lacks. Good title for a book, though.”

Read David Marsh’s “10 grammar rules you can forget,” an edited extract from his book For Who the Bell Tolls

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Marsh has been a journalist for nearly 40 years and is production editor of the Guardian UK, which he joined in 1996. He edits the Guardian style guide and the Guardian’s “Mind your language” blog. He currently runs a masterclass in subediting for students on the MA Print Journalism course at Sheffield University, where he is an external examiner.

ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:
In “The Devil’s Dictionary at 100,” an essay that appeared in the October 2, 2013 issue of The SmartSet.com newsletter, writer-artist Stefany Anne Golberg makes a retrospective and biographical sketch of Ambrose Bierce, the infamous curmudgeon who published in 1906 The Cynic’s Word Book, a bilious, blistering attack on everything in society that he deemed hypocritical, particularly politicians, organized religion, and the aristocracy. Retitled as The Devil’s Dictionary two years later as Bierce had devoutly wished for, the book has proven to be an enduring damnation of human hypocrisy, avarice, and selfishness. Golberg says it was written by a journalist who saw things as they really were and knew that there had to be another way: “He had seen America in the depths of hell, had seen love from the bottom of a pit. He had shaken hands with greedy governors and jaded journalists, saw how men and women could abuse each other in the name of freedom and justice and altruism.”

The Devil's Dictionary

Read Stefany Anne Golberg’s “The Devil’s Dictionary at 100” in The SmartSet.com now!

DOWNLOAD THE WHOLE BOOK IN PDF:
Click this link to download Ambrose Bierce’s The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary for free!

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