Good English [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION This book attempts to examine the principles that underlie good written English, and to suggest the best methods by which you may learn to write good English yourself. This is a vaguer task than the grammarian's, and one more difficult to accomplish. He deals with lan^age after it has been written down, and makes his rules to fit with current practice, not to guide it. Like the student of anatomy, his work is to probe and dissect, and he has a whole dictionary of terms by which he may label whatever he finds. To know these labels will not help you to write good EngHsh. You may be learned in all the uses of restrictive and illative and copulative clauses, and yet be unable to compose a single sentence with lucidity and ease. The study of formal grammar is useful in itself, but it wiU no more help you to write than a knowledge of anatomy wiU help a lame man to walk. This book therefore tries to avoid grammatical labels as far as possible, though in discussing sentence-structure it has sometimes been necessary to borrow them. It aims at showing the processes of prose construction, and once you understand them and have practised them for yourselves, you have no need to know the grammarian's names for them. To have talked much and read much is of more value in learning to write good English than to have parsed and analysed half a library. Yet, you may ask, how far can good writing