-
How not to write badly (2)
2. Write sentences the right way round I remember editing a book on Asian history in which the author insisted on writing sentences something like this: As the Manchus had banned the queue, many men felt a loss of face which I would of course correct, and he’d be very upset, mostly because I replaced…
-
How not to write badly (1)
Writing well is a skill that can only be acquired by working hard at it. You cannot overnight become a good writer. But you can quite easily avoid being a bad writer by following simple rules. I’m going to write a few posts in which I set out some of those rules. I won’t be…
-
More or fewer or less
When it comes to English, I am somewhat caught between two stools. As a student of language, I am of course a descriptivist. No one who has a decent understanding of what language is can think it’s desirable to take a prescriptivist line because we do not speak in accordance with an academy, the Oxford…
-
More about less and fewer
One of the key battles for pedants in their mostly fruitless fight to force English speakers not to speak the English they speak or write the English they write is to restrict the meaning of the word “less”. We all know the rule: you write “fewer” when you mean fewer of a count noun; and…
-
On whether you should write whether
One of my big nits as an editor is the slurring of fhe fields of meaning for words. So it irks me that “therefore” and “thus” are used interchangeably because they can convey different meanings, which makes them more useful tools. (The difference, tout court, is that “therefore” means “because of this” and “thus” means…