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ADVICE AND DISSENT
This page features notable advocacies in English grammar and usage as well as dissenting voices or controversies about the language. Various viewpoints will be presented here to enable users and learners of English to have a deeper understanding and appreciation of its finer points and its changing or still unsettled aspects.
I hope you’d find the clash of views about English grammar and usage in this page both enlightening and entertaining!
A great teacher shares her secrets to persuasive, compelling writing
There’s one more book on English writing that I believe should be on very aspiring writer’s reference shelf along with such indispensables as William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing, and Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. It’s actually an old book that dates back to 1965, when the Internet, cellular telephony and texting, and video teleconferencing weren’t even a faint glimmer yet in the communications horizon, thus making some people think of that book as now sorely outdated and passé. On the contrary, I believe that it has admirably stood up against the test of time in the incisiveness of its instruction and the depth of its insights about the writing craft—certainly far better than what many of the scores of how-to and quick-and-easy books on writing today can hope to do. That book is Lucile Vaughan Payne’s The Lively Art of Writing.
As I recount in my new book Give Your English the Winning Edge, I discovered The Lively Art of Writing many years ago when I was a young man still very self-consciously grappling with writing technique. The slim book—it’s only 192 pages—taught me one unforgettable truth about doing a sentence: it’s all a matter of developing a basic idea. Through this book I learned that no matter how complex our thoughts might be, we can actually boil down each of them to a few words that capture its essential meaning, and that it’s only when we ask ourselves—or when other people ask us—to support and justify those simple ideas that we need to elaborate on them with more words.
I cannot recommend The Lively Art of Writing too highly to college students who need nuts-and-bolts instruction on how to write incisive and more convincing essays and term papers, to entry-level professionals who need to make their memos, business reports, and letters better organized and more persuasive, and to professional writers and editors who feel the need to make their thoughts and ideas in print much more readable and compelling.
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