The Complete Plain Words

I first read this book cover-to-cover, like a novel. It is interesting, easy to read and entertaining. It also covers a LOT of ground without being complicated or long-winded.

I bought this book in the late 90s and I still refer to it regularly. It's a fantastic little reference book. It explains things very clearly, and the examples it uses are very helpful indeed.

Its index is great; you can find what you're looking for very quickly.

It's refreshing to read a book about English usage which reflects our times and stresses the importance of clarity and elegance over blind adherence to Latin-based rules (e.g. it takes a sensible and pragmatic approach to the splitting of infinitives and to sentences ending with prepositions), but which at the same time doesn't do any "dumbing down" - everything it recommends is firmly rooted in good grammar and educated, clear use of the language.

This book was first published 52 years ago, but it has been updated to keep it current. In my opinion it is the best book you can buy if you want a clear, concise, sensible guide to writing well.

Oh - and the section on verbo-pomposity is a hoot!

AVOIDING CATACHRESIS (10/44 people found this helpful)

'Catachresis' is a simple Greek word meaning 'misuse'. If you had never come across it in English before, neither had I until I read it in the second chapter of this book, where it is displayed proudly in the course of a lesson to us on the correct use of the word 'jargon'. The first edition of the book appeared in 1948, and it has reappeared in at least 5 revisions and reprints, my own copy dating from 1964. It must have sold well in that case, and while it purports to be trying to teach the British civil service how to write clearly, the author soon forgets this limited aim and treats us to yet another enthusiastic handbook on the proper use of English, a field I had thought well and truly ploughed and reploughed by Fowler, Quiller-Couch, A P Herbert and others. This is how it will have been read by its eager public, and so this is how it should be assessed. Half a century is not nearly long enough for such a work to go out of date, but of course a lot of the interest in reading it today is precisely in seeing how well it has stood the test of so many years, particularly in the age of email. However I found it even more interesting from a sociological viewpoint. 'Who's talking?' I kept asking myself. Who feels like pontificating in print on this subject, and why should the rest of us take any notice?

We can forget the ostensible objective. Who on earth supposes that the language of the civil service is even trying to be clear much of the time? Whitehall mandarins write memos designed in the main to cover their rear, just as commercial executives do. When clarity is really their aim, it is perfectly compatible with lumpish expression, bad grammar, bad syntax, bad spelling and bad handwriting. The best-crafted English in the world will not make what they say unambiguous in a court of law, as is memorably shown by the story of the use of cleaning-rags 'in shops and places other than shops'. You, I and they might have thought that covered all possibilities, but not according to the judge who ruled that a mobile ice-cream tricycle was not a place. This book is really just another guide to good English, for the general public. As such, it is intelligent, balanced, stylish, clear and good-humoured. Gowers is neither pedantic nor unduly tolerant of shoddy writing. He understands that a language is a living thing, and he does his best to judge which neologisms are part of the organic development of the language and which are pimples and warts that could do with removing. Any educated reader with an ear for the language and a love of the language could probably do as well as he does, and I wonder what he would have made of the use of 'rendition' in 2005. I feel he is wasting his breath with his complaints about philosophers' idiom at the start of chapter 8 - philosophers have to write they way they do, just as lawyers have to. Checking his tastes against my own, I find us largely in agreement. I shall go to my final reckoning innocent of using 'anticipate' to mean 'expect', or 'aftermath' to mean 'outcome'. On the other hand I think he overdoes his objection to 'feasible' in the sense of 'plausible', and I can't see that 'the troops were issued with rations' is any worse than 'the troops were given rations', but I shall correct my use of 'comprise' in future in accordance with his strictures. I also agree that brevity makes for clarity, but it has its pitfalls too, as in a recipe that told me 'remove dish from oven and stand on a hot plate', or as in the exam question 'What can be said with confidence about...?' which got the answer 'Anything. Just say it with confidence'. And I wondered during chapter 8 whether the author was familiar with the term 'agglutinative', which gives respectability to expressions consisting entirely of nouns, e.g. 'city dockside warehouse fire'.

Who's telling us all this anyhow? It's not just Ernest Gowers, it's Sir Ernest Gowers. Anyone using his title like this invites derision. Did his wife say to him at breakfast 'Would you like more toast, Sir Ernest?', or perhaps, in those tender intimate moments, 'That was wonderful, Sir Ernest, how was it for you?' The whole attitude underlying the book is a memorial of an era when Whitehall was the High Indaba of the British establishment. Future Sir Ernests took firsts in classics at Cambridge, joined the civil service and were later appointed to chair the Coal Mines Reorganisation Commission (later the Coal Commission) and similar. They were the mandarin administrators of Clement Attlee's socialist commonwealth of Britain and they lived by the gospel of Whitehall Knows Best. They recruited and assessed their successors in the manner of wine-experts judging a grand cru, and they brought a similar fastidiousness to their style of writing. Clarity was important mainly for giving them a criterion in criticising the writing of other civil servants, what really mattered was a special elevated style, or what they took for such a style. Out of hours they wrote, and - worse - read, articles and letters of dumbfounding pomposity in The Times newspaper expounding this or that nicety in the use of English. They were clever men (mainly), they were upright and dedicated men, they were highly educated men, but the mystery to me in retrospect is why equally educated members of the general public ever took seriously the pretensions of any chairman of the Coal Mines Reorganisation Commission (later the Coal Commission) to special expertise in the use of English. If I had at any stage been the boss of the future Sir Ernest on his way up and had caught him wrestling with The Choice of Words or such like preoccupations in His Majesty's time and at the taxpayer's expense, I think my own words to him would have been a model of the clarity he values so highly, and they would have been 'Get on with what you're paid to do'.

Confused words (10/28 people found this helpful)

I bought this book on the strength of the previous reviews. I wanted to improve my grammar & punctuation. After starting to read some of this book I became even more confused. Don't buy this book unless you already have a very strong foundation in grammar & punctuation.

Valuable lessons entertainingly delivered (30/32 people found this helpful)

The premise of this book is that writing is a tool that should enable communication and minimize misunderstandings, not a tool with which to show-off learning. This premise shines out in every chapter as the author deals with: choosing the correct word, avoiding superfluous words, arranging words well, and punctuating clearly.

This is not a strict grammar with definitive statements on the split infinitive or the use of hyphens, it is a council of commonsense, filled with examples of poor English (often very funny ones), and suggestions for how they should be improved.. The result is a fantastic and valuable guide to how to write better.

I learnt a lot from this book and enjoyed reading it cover to cover. It also has an excellent index making it a useful reference work. Now all I have to do is learn how to put these great lessons into practise.

A readable and interesting guide to writing in English (50/50 people found this helpful)

This is a classic book. The first sentence of the Prologue says "the main purpose of this book is to help officials in their use of written English as a tool of their trade". I think that this book should be required reading for all officials, bureaucrats, managers and other professional people who have to write in English as part of their work.

I particularly like the many examples throughout the book of poor writing followed by the improved versions suggested by the author. The meaning of the improved versions is crystal clear in comparison with the original versions! And the improved versions are much easier to read.

There is a checklist of words and phrases to be used with care. It occupies 70 pages of the book and contains a few hundred words and phrases. Many of the words listed have their own proper function, but they are often used by unwary or careless writers in place of a simpler or more apt word. It is well worth reading through the author's comments and recommendations for each entry.

This is a book that I have read and re-read, and I now try to practice what Gowers preaches.

Sir Ernest Gowers

Reader Reviews:

Fantastic little book (11/11 people found this helpful)

AVOIDING CATACHRESIS (10/44 people found this helpful)

Confused words (10/28 people found this helpful)

Valuable lessons entertainingly delivered (30/32 people found this helpful)

A readable and interesting guide to writing in English (50/50 people found this helpful)

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