Curtis Stephen - THE PENGUIN WRITERS MANUAL

PENGUIN REFERENCE

The Penguin Writers Manual

Martin H. Manser has been a professional reference-book editor since 1980. He received a BA Honours degree in linguistics at the conclusion of his studies at the universities of York, England, and Regensburg, Germany, and went on to gain an M.Phil. degree for research into the influence of English on modern German. A developing interest in lexicography led him to take up a post as a reference-book editor. Since 1980 he has worked on about one hundred reference books with a contemporary appeal. His English-language reference titles include the Penguin Wordmaster Dictionary, the Bloomsbury Good Word Guide, Chambers Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms, the Macmillan Students Dictionary, the Facts on File Visual Dictionary, the Oxford Learners Pocket Dictionary, the Guinness Book of Words, the New Penguin Thesaurus and The Wordsworth Crossword Companion (with Stephen Curtis).

He has also compiled and edited many titles that encourage Bible reading, including the NIV Thematic Study Bible on which he was Managing Editor, (Hodder & Stoughton and Zondervan), the Hodder & Stoughton and Zondervan Dictionary of Bible Themes, Bible Quotation Collection (Lion), The Christian Quotation Collection (Westminster John Knox), the Listening to God Bible reading series, Da/7y Guidance (Cumberland House), the Amazing Book of Bible Facts (Marshall Pickering), Crash Course in Christian Teaching (Hodder & Stoughton), Dictionary of the Bible (co-author; Macmillan/Cumberland House), Bible Stories (Parragon), Common Worship Lectionary (Oxford University Press), Handbook of Bible Promises (co-author; Eagle) and / Never Knew That was in the Bible (Nelson).

He and his wife live in Aylesbury and have a son and a daughter.

Stephen Curtis was educated at The Queens College, Oxford, where he took a first-class degree in Modern Languages, and at the University of York. He was an English lecturer for ten years and, after a brief spell as a Co-op milkman and call-centre interviewer, joined the publishing firm of Collier Macmillan as a lexicographer in 1984. Since 1988 he has worked as a freelance lexicographer, translator and writer. He has recently contributed to, among others, the Encarta World English Dictionary, The New Penguin English Dictionary and Chambers Dictionary of World History. He is author of Increase Your Word Power and (also with Martin Manser) The Wordsworth Crossword Companion. He lives in Bath.

Martin Manser

Stephen Curtis

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2002
13

Copyright Martin H. Manser and Stephen Curtis, 2002
All rights reserved

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Contents

Acknowledgments

The writers acknowledge with gratitude Nigel Wilcocksons comments on drafts of the text and Robert Allens advice on points of usage in .

Introduction

The Penguin Writers Manual is intended as a guide and companion for anyone who wants to write or is faced with the task of writing.

Part One of this book helps you to learn how to write good and correct English by presenting in a clear and easily understandable way the rules, both written and unwritten, that underpin communication in English. It contains sections on grammar, usage, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, and abbreviations.

Part Two is more directly concerned with the task of writing. It will show you, step by step, how to prepare and plan a piece of writing in order to give yourself the best chance of communicating effectively. It will help you to improve your writing style. It also discusses and illustrates how to tackle various everyday writing tasks, such as composing letters, essays, and reports.

There is no great secret to being a writer. There is no universal open sesame that suddenly makes everything clear for everyone. That is, perhaps, bad news. The good news is that with care, common sense, and practice, everyone should be able to write plainly and well, or learn to write better and more confidently. Even if there is no universal key, it is still the authors hope that every reader will find in this book guidance and encouragement to turn writing into a rewarding activity.

Martin Manser
Stephen Curtis

Part One

In Tom Stoppards play Travesties, there is a scene in which the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara takes a copy of Shakespeares sonnet Shall I compare thee to a summers day?, cuts it up into individual words with a pair of scissors, puts the words into a hat, and proceeds to draw them out again one at a time at random to create a new poem.

If there were such a thing as a language without grammar, it would be rather like the words in that hat a jumble, a meaningless collection and the process of communicating in that language would be as haphazard as the Dadaist method of creating poetry. In fact, all languages have a grammar, and all users of language must know something of the grammar of the language they are using in order to be able to communicate in it at all. Children, unknowingly, learn grammar as they learn to speak and as they gradually increase the range and sophistication of the things they are able to say. They quickly learn the difference between a statement (I want some), a question (Can I have some?), and a command (Give me some) three types of utterance to which grammar books might devote whole chapters. People frequently complain that they do not know any grammar or were never taught any grammar, but only the second of these complaints is likely to be strictly true.

The point is, of course, that knowledge exists at different levels. Most people nowadays know what a computer is. They can describe what a computer looks like from the outside and roughly what it can do. They can probably use one. Only an expert, though, can describe what a computer is like on the inside and precisely how it functions. The average user of language is perhaps like the average computer user getting along quite happily until something goes wrong, at which point everything suddenly becomes technical and incomprehensible and someone with specialist knowledge is needed to put matters right.

The purpose of this section of the book is to give ordinary users of English some of the technical know-how they need to solve language difficulties if they should arise. It is also intended to help them acquire some inside knowledge of the way the English language actually works. Last but not least, it may also help them to become more able and confident communicators in a medium that is one of the most versatile and expressive methods of conveying thoughts and feelings that has ever existed.