Pitman's Commercial Correspondence and Commercial English [antikvár]

INTRODUCTORY There is gratifying evidence of an awakened feeling that Commercial English has hitherto been on wrong lines, having developed a j argon of its own even worse than journalese and very distressing to every educated person whose misfortune it is to have to reád letters expressed in it. The University of London must be given the credit of largely stimulating that feeling when it gave a literary character to its papers set in English for Matriculation. This change which was made somé eighteen years ago, has undoubtedly borne good fruit. For generál purposes, it is of infinitely greater irnportance to the ordinary student of English that he should laiow the language on its literary side than that he should cram up a number of philological facts that would quickly pass from his memory. The treatment of English as a living, not an antiquarian, study might be expected, sooner or later, to breed discontent with the too long established standards of a language of commerce. For whatever purpose English may be used, it eannot be necessary to degrade it. A business letter is quite as effective, and certainly more agreeable, if it is written in the English acceptable to educated society. This is not to say that the writer of such a letter is required to be a Macaulay, or a Ruskin, but it does mean that he should conform to the usages of approved literature. It is only by reading that the literary sense can be cultivated, and all that can be said here is that the user of this book should steep himself in the writirígs of our standard authors, whether in prose or verse. The immediate object of the present work is to lay a solid foundation on which the student can confidently build the structure of his own compositions-confidently, because he will have learnt what errors of construction he should avoid and how to avoid them. Taste will come with wider reading. To correctness, at least, this manual will, it is hoped, succeed in pointing the way.