Building a Library
English Usage by Humphrey Evans

So, you've become comfortable with commas as a result of following the advice in Lynne Truss's gently amusing mega-seller Eats, Shoots & Leaves. What next?

A good place to go is David Crystal's Rediscover Grammar. David Crystal has been both a professor of linguistics and a freelance writer so knows how to explain the various functions of nouns and verbs, concord and phrase structures. He can even play with oddities such as adrift, ablaze and aware. They're not quite adjectives and they're not quite adverbs: all you can say is that they begin with the letter a. David Crystal is about to bring out a companion volume, Making Sense of Grammar, which should be well worth looking at, too.

Wynford Hicks, with English for journalists, moves over into writing, with advice on style and handling reported speech as well as grammar and spelling. A review quoted on the back cover sums up the appeal: It's short. It's accessible. It's cheap. And it tells you what you want to know.

Essential English, by the newly knighted Harold Evans, much-praised former editor of The Sunday Times, started life as Newsman's English, which shows how American-oriented he was even before going to the States and how unisex British journalistic English has become in the meantime. Journalistic English does aim to be clear and straightforward which makes his advice generally useful.

Bill Bryson is Bill Bryson, but he was once a sub-editor on The Independent and that experience shows up in Troublesome Words. He's done such a good job of looking through the older reference books that you can almost put to one side Fowler's, as it tends to be known, and Gowers' Plain Words. In setting a tone that matches his own writing, he gives you a rule for when to use like and when as, then allows you to suspend it if you wish.

Even more troublesome words show up in The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, Odwe, as it gets called. If you want to know the original definition of enormity, or that sea lion is two words, or that the Prussian Imperial family was known as the House of Hohenzollern, this is the book for you. The Economist Style Guide helps out with things like names of countries and political leaders, as with their version of Colonel Qaddafi - or should that be Gadaffi, or Gadafy, or even, as The Times English Style Guide once tried to suggest, Gadhdhafi.

Then there is a book that puts all this within one framework, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language by, once again, David Crystal. For some reason I like knowing that cucumber is one of the oldest words in the English language and I enjoy being able to read some of its more obtuse entries such as The Structure of the Lexicon and Varieties of Discourse.

On top of that, in a feat of publishing confusion, there are two books identically titled The State of the Language, both edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, both with completely different content and tellable apart only by the fact that one comes in a yellow jacket and the other in red. But the content is just wonderful, article after article on things like The Voices of Business, or Radio Talk, or The Language of Sisterhood (that one contributed by Angela Carter), or Cliches (that one by Christopher Ricks himself).

I'd complete this library, though, with Stylistics by G W Turner. George Turner investigates matters such as tone and rhythm and register as well as vocabulary, thus teasing apart the different kinds of style that allowed Punch to amuse us with its reworking of William Wordsworth - "O cuckoo, shall I call thee bird / Or but a wandering voice? / State the alternative preferred; / Give reasons for your choice."

Humphrey Evans spends half of his working life teaching sub-editing skills to anybody willing to pay and the other half worrying about what they will do if they ever get their hands on something he has written. Next week, Don Grant on motoring

The Independent on Sunday, 15 February 2004