Books : Reference : Dictionaries & Thesauri : Usage Guides

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Books : Reference : Dictionaries & Thesauri : Usage Guides

• Eats shoots and leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

  Lynne Truss

  
  
   

• The Penguin Guide to Punctuation (Penguin Reference Books)

  R.L. Trask

  
  
   

• Style Guide (Economist (Hardcover))

  
  Most newspapers and magazines issue their contributors with a style guide. Writers, be they on staff or freelance, then know whether a publication's house style requires % or per cent or commas in dates. Sometimes it's just a tatty sheet of typed A4 but since 1986 The Economist has developed its stylish Style Guide, through six editions, into a full length reference book.

  Because English is such a vast and continuously evolving language--its vocabulary is double that of French and more than three times larger than German--it is open to multifarious use and all the old arguments about correctness or lack of it. The Economist unequivocally sets out its version of what is acceptable and why, usually conforming to Fowler's Modern English Usage and other good guides to getting it right. It also refutes dozens of common errors, stating firmly, for example, that "Data are plural" and that "Any one refers to a number; anyone to anybody."

  Since its style guide is set out in such detail, it makes sense to publish it for the rest of the world, most of whom are not writers for The Economist but who simply want a succinctly witty guide to writing accurately. The first section focuses on minutiae such as distinguishing between a "little-used car" and a "little used-car". It also insists that "to never split an infinitive is quite easy" and, in English so impeccable that you have to read it twice to be sure, that "Frankenstein was not a monster, but his creator." After a section setting out rules governing American and British English this handy reference book provides a miscellany of useful information including abbreviations, currencies, calendars and conversions for metric and imperial measurements. --Susan Elkin

  
   

• Oxford Guide to Plain English

  Martin Cutts

  
  
   

• Adult Learners' Guide to Spelling

  Anne Betteridge

  
  
   

• The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (Oxford Paperback Reference)

  Judith Siefring, Jennifer Speake

  
  
   

• The Oxford Style Manual

  Robert Ritter

  
  The Oxford Style Manual is gloriously thorough double whammy of a book that unites the famous Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors and the Oxford Guide to Style (once known as Hart's Rules) for the first time.

  If you don't know the en or em rules or how to use your solidus or vertical (aka--a standard abbreviation which needs no punctuation--as a forward slash) then this is your chance to find out. And what happens when you need to write a foreign word--perhaps Polish, Urdu or Icelandic--but you don't know what the accents are called, let alone where to find them on your computer? Oxford Style Manual is strong on diacritics-- signs and symbols on, or near, letters. There's helpful advice about foreign names too: "To call Calais callis would be obscurantist, to call Munich Munchen exhibitionist".

  The vexed laws, conventions and effects of copyright and the stylistic mysteries of special subjects from music to Jewish scriptures are all meticulously detailed in Oxford Style Manual's first sixteen chapters. The second half is an alphabetical listing: eccentric dictionary cum mini-encyclopaedia crossed with an authoritative account of written dos and don'ts (neither of which needs an apostrophe). Thus you learn that a diglot is a book containing text in two languages, a bequerel is a unit of radioactivity and school-leaving age needs a hyphen whereas sleeping bag does not.

  It's a dream book for wordoholics and pedants to browse in and a valuable useful reference work for those who just want to get things right whether they work in the print media or not.--Susan Elkin

  
   

• Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English (Penguin Reference Books)

  Eric Partridge

  
  
   

• The Complete Plain Words

  Sir Ernest Gowers

  
  
   

• Fowler's Modern English Usage (Re-Revised 3rd Edition)

  R. W. Burchfield

  
  
   

• Red Herrings and White Elephants

  Albert Jack

  
  
   

• Dictionary of French Slang and Colloquial Expressions

  Henry Strutz

  
  
   

• The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left

  David Crystal

  
  
   

• Quick Solutions to Common Errors in English: An A-Z Guide to Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar

  Angela Burt

  
  
   

• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

  Lynne Truss

  
  
   

• Dictionary of Italian Slang and Colloquial Expressions

  Daniela Gobetti

  
  
   

• The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World (Penguin Pockets)

  Adam Jacot de Boinod

  
  
   

• Italian Idioms (Barron's Idioms Series)

  Daniela Gobetti

  
  
   

• Fowler's Modern English Usage (2nd Edition)

  H.W. Fowler

  
  
   

• Revised Medieval Latin Word List: From British and Irish Sources (Medieval Latin Dictionary (British Academy))