Question sent as a private message by Totodan, new Forum member (December 5, 2011):Hi, Joe! I recently bought your book
Give Your English the Winning Edge. Written at the topmost part of the cover, right above the title, is the statement: “This time, excellent English is now within your easy reach!”
There is something about the statement that makes me uncomfortable. I think it could have done away with either the phrase “this time” or the word “now.” Having both of them in that statement sounds like excessively emphasizing the present, don’t you think?
I hope I don’t sound irreverent, Joe, knowing how punctilious and careful you are in your work. I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
But let me state on record that I find the book extremely authoritative and an outstanding supplement to your earlier work,
English Plain and Simple.
Warmest regards to you and to all Forum readers!
My reply to Totodan:I’m delighted to know that you have bought a copy of my book,
Give Your English the Winning Edge. I’m sure you’ll find it a reliable informative resource in your continuing quest for better English.
That comment of yours is very perceptive, Totodan, and I’d like to assure you that you’re not being irreverent at all in calling my attention to the language of that blurb for my book. In fact, I’m glad that you’ve given me this opportunity to explain why I phrased that blurb precisely this way:
“This time, excellent English is now within your reach.”You said that this blurb makes you uncomfortable for sounding like it’s excessively emphasizing the present. Your feeling is that it would read better if it does away with either the phrase “this time” or the word “now,” as follows:
“Excellent English is now within your reach.”or:
“This time, excellent English is within your reach.”I’m sure that with this opportunity to look at all three variations of the blurb, you can begin to feel and fully appreciate the difference in their shades of meaning.
To begin with, both of your suggested versions have only one overt time frame in mind: the present.
The first, “Excellent English is now within your reach,” denotes a present condition or state without alluding to a previous one; it simply declares that at present, excellent English is now within the reach of those being addressed. I would say that from an advertising standpoint, it’s a ho-hum, almost trivial statement that’s not particularly worthy of a second look.
The second, while grammatically correct, is semantically problematic. Read it more closely to see what I mean: “This time, excellent English is within your reach.” Without the implicit inference to a previous condition or state (the silent “then” implied by the adverb “now” in your first version), there’s a certain disconnect between the qualifier “this time” and the clause “excellent English is within you reach.” Indeed, without “now” in the main clause, the adverbial modifier “this time” becomes grammatically superfluous. In fact, that “now”-less version of the blurb, “This time, excellent English is within your reach,” is a trivial declarative statement—one definitely not worthy of being used as a come-on for the book.
This brings me to why I decided to use this more attention-getting blurb instead:
“This time, excellent English is now within your reach.”That statement explicitly operates on two time frames: (1) the time (“the last time”) when the book being touted wasn’t available yet, which can be inferred from the use of “this time,” and (2) the present time denoted by the adverb “now” in the main clause. We can better understand the sense intended by that statement by going over the following bit of dialogue:
Speaker #1: “I don’t have the courage to propose to Sally. When I courted her four years ago, she dismissed me as nothing but a good-for-nothing AB undergrad.”
Speaker #2: “But that was the last time.
This time, you are now a full-fledged lawyer. Go for it!”
Now, see how the drama in Speaker #2’s retort all but vanishes when we take out “this time” from the second sentence:
Speaker #1: “I don’t have the courage to propose to Sally. When I courted her four years ago, she dismissed me as nothing but a good-for-nothing AB undergrad.”
Speaker #2: “But that was the last time.
You are now a full-fledged lawyer. Go for it!”
See also the same thing happen when we take out “now” from that second sentence:
Speaker #1: “I don’t have the courage to propose to Sally. When I courted her four years ago, she dismissed me as nothing but a good-for-nothing AB undergrad.”
Speaker #2: “But that was the last time.
This time, you are a full-fledged lawyer. Go for it!”
I hope that by this time, it’s already clear why I phrased that blurb for my book that way. We can say that this is actually a little demonstration of the difference between plain and simple English, on one hand, and the language of advertising, on the other. The first primarily aims only to be clearly understood; the other, to catch your attention by using much more emphatic language in the hope that you’ll buy the idea—in this particular case, to buy the book.
