The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (New Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd Ed) by H. W. Fowler

The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (New Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd Ed)



The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (New Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd Ed)



The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (New Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd Ed) H. W. Fowler ebook
Details info: EPUB, PDF, MOBI, 1010 pages, English
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Fowler's Modern English Usage has served for nearly 80 years as the indispensable guide to anyone who wants to write clear and vigorous English. Nonetheless, 80 years is a long time to retain the word "modern" in the title of a book, and clearly the examples from newspapers of the first quarter of the 20th century have lost most of their currency, and even the examples from the literature of Fowler's period have aged as well. Clearly, therefore, some modernization was needed. This was partially achieved in the 2nd edition, edited by Ernest Gowers in 1965: Gowers did away with much of Fowler's idiosyncratic arrangement of his material, but he left most of the writing unchanged. Anyway, 1965 is also a long time ago, and much has changed since then. A thorough rewriting was therefore probably needed, and there is much to admire in Burchfield's 3rd edition. If Fowler's book had never existed, and Burchfield's were the first of its kind, one might even praise it as an excellent reference. Unfortunately for Burchfield, however, Fowler's book did precede it, and it is impossible to read Burchfield on any topic without missing Fowler's way of handling the same topic. You may not agree with every opinion that Fowler expressed, but he never left you in any doubt about what he thought and why he thought it. Burchfield emerges as a wishy-washy committee man by comparison. Before undertaking the 3rd edition he was known for his excellent work on the Oxford English Dictionary, but compiling a dictionary is a very different business from writing a continuous piece of prose, and it is not obvious that skill in the one implies skill in the other. Gowers, incidentally, was known before he undertook the 2nd edition for his own books about clear writing. It would be an exaggeration to say that he single-handedly reformed the way that British civil servants write documents to be read by the general public, but he certainly made a large contribution to this. Burchfield's book is not as bad as some critics maintain, and it has the merit of including many genuinely modern examples and of recognizing, as Fowler barely did, that English is a world language. It is worth having on your bookshelf, therefore, but not as a replacement for Fowler. For most people the edition of choice remains the 2nd edition -- easier to find your way around than the 1st edition, and retaining all of its force. It will not be surprising if Oxford decide in due course to reissue the 2nd edition, or, if that is too much of an admission of making a mistake, to issue a 4th edition that takes the 2nd as its starting point. At present it does not appear to be possible to buy a new copy of the 2nd edition, but it is not difficult to find a used copy.

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