The first edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage was published in 1926, the second in 1965, the third in 1996 and the fourth in 2015. That the time gap between each edition has progressively shortened aptly reflects the accelerating pace of evolutionary change in our wonderful language.
The second edition contains many gems. Some are usefully plain and simple, such as reminders of the difference between factious, factitious and fictitious or the nuances that lie between falsehood, falseness and falsity.
Often Fowler provides colourful history and background on changes in word usage, such as the word ‘larboard’ being displaced by the word 'port' because of the potential confusion with the word 'starboard', which could cause a fatal collision at sea if one was shouting directions in a roaring storm.
But Fowler is not the stickler that people often assume. For example, he is quite relaxed about split infinitives, provided you know which category of the 'English-speaking world' you belong to: a) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; b) those who do not know, but care very much; c) those who know and condemn; d) those who know and approve; and e) those who know and distinguish.
Fowler's succinctness is sublime. In his summary of the differences between humour, wit, satire, sarcasm, invective, irony, cynicism and the sardonic, he manages to list the defining features of these eight terms in a table consisting of a mere 72 words.
Occasionally Fowler can be irritatingly smug, but in a lazy age we often forget his fine distinctions or dismiss them as elitist pedantry.
A carpenter would look askance at a toolbox consisting of a hammer and a piece of string and most painters prefer a range of colours to monochrome. Fowler helps us to celebrate word diversity and its fundamental usefulness in the writer's toolbox.
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage - H. W. Fowler, Second Edition
In this book Bragg takes an inspirational wander through the wonders of the English language by describing its living nature in the form of a biography.
He begins his life history fifteen hundred years ago, when the language of the British Celts (garnished with some leftover Latin) was fused with the language of the invading Anglo-Saxons, who brought with them words such as frost, three, four, lamb, sea, bread, rain, snow and sleep.
The biography describes the traumatic adolescence of English following the Norman invasion, with the introduction of around ten thousand French words that we now take for granted such as music, chimney, calendar, reason, hour, calm, precious, crime, people, solid and joy.
In Melvyn Bragg’s narrative, English then starts to mature into adulthood during the Renaissance. The opening up of trade routes brought words into our vocabulary from fifty other languages, including ‘yacht’ (Dutch), ‘embargo’ (Spain) and ‘alcohol’ (Arabic). Renaissance art also embellished English with words such as fresco, miniature and design.
And much of this language history happened before Shakespeare, who alone is credited with introducing two thousand words to English along with a host of new expressions.
Following the Elizabethan era, Bragg completes his biography by tracing the language into older age, describing four hundred years of English evolution, heavily loaded with the linguistic trappings of our imperialist past.
Throughout, the biography tempts us to read to the end and find out whether Bragg believes the language to be dead or not. The final chapter begins inauspiciously with an extract of text-speak that reads, ‘I cdnt bleve wot I was cing!’, followed by a list of words recently added to the OED including bigorexia, dischuffed, lookism, and rumpy-pumpy.
However, Melvyn ends very optimistically with the thought that the adventure of English is bound to continue its constant adaption and evolution. Sick!
The Adventure of English - Melvyn Bragg
Whether we are writing fiction or non-fiction, we are all storytellers, even though our narratives can take many forms.
Most fiction writers like to use setting, character and plot to build the story in a largely sequential narrative arc before amazing the reader with a wonderful ending. Much non-fiction uses a similarly sequential and 'bottom-up' approach – building the case from many different angles, so that the conclusions that pop out at the end seem unassailable.
The Pyramid Principle suggests that the most effective persuasion often reverses this approach with a 'top-down' narrative – leading with the conclusion first and then using everything that follows to substantiate the main point.
Although much revered in business schools and management consultancies for almost four decades, The Pyramid Principle has wider applicability to all non-fiction writing. The book reminds us to be clear about which type of argument will serve us best, either deductive reasoning with one thought following logically from the other, or inductive reasoning where we drive home points of a similar kind to convince the reader through sheer weight of evidence.
The title of the book derives from the importance of ordering our arguments into a hierarchical structure, with ideas at any one level always summarising the ideas grouped below them.
Ultimately, Barbara Minto's book is a checklist for how to marshal our arguments and structure our text in a way that will land with maximum clarity on our target audience.
Indirectly, the book is highly relevant to fiction writers too – who can argue with a proposition that forces us to think forensically about how the reader will experience a piece of writing? In many ways the book describes a system for achieving reader empathy, which is surely relevant to storytelling in all its many guises.
The Pyramid Principle - Barbara Minto
Most writers of fiction will have read books about the nature of writing itself. The range of options is bewildering. On the one hand, there are many books available on literary theory and criticism that are written by brilliant academics who have little experience of writing fiction themselves, resulting in a reading experience that can seem at best daunting or at worst impenetrably arcane. At the other end of the spectrum, there are many books of a more 'how to' and anecdotal nature, which are written by practising writers, but are somewhat lighter on the theoretical aspects of writing that are useful to know (e.g. Stephen King's On Writing, Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer and E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel).
David Lodge is uniquely positioned to bridge this gap between the theory and practice of writing, because in addition to being a professor of English literature for many years, he has written several television screenplays, stage plays and novels (two of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize).
Two of Lodge's books on writing are particularly recommended. First, The Art of Fiction, which is a collection of fifty short articles on subjects as diverse as point-of-view, magic realism, time-shift, unreliable narrators and metafiction. Each article begins with well chosen extracts from the works of (usually famous) authors, which Lodge then uses to illustrate his observations on the topic of each article. With its bite-sized format, the book is easy to dip into occasionally and is written in a very accessible yet thoughtful style.
The second recommendation is Lodge's The Practice of Writing, which includes a number of his essays and lectures on the modern novel as well as particular reflections on the writing of some of Lodge's favourite authors, including Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, James Joyce and Kingsley Amis. The essays achieve that rare feat of being erudite whilst at the same time being refreshingly conversational.
Consequently, reading a writer writing about writing becomes an absolute pleasure!
The Art of Fiction - David Lodge
The Practice of Writing - David Lodge
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