| Book of the Month | ||
|
Business Grammar and Usage | |
Publisher: Financial Times / Longman
Author: Peter Strutt
221 pages.
ISBN: 0 582 365759
If you are a businessman or businesswoman, you will already know that your career will be helped by knowing English. And this is true for everyone, from secretary to managing director. Longman are a well-known publisher of EFL books, and the Financial Times publish Britians top business newspaper, so the pair of them should be able to do a good business studies course. Although this book works well by itself, you can also use it together with a website . We are still not convinced that this idea works, but the publishers have also done it for the other books in the Market Leader series, which includes Banking, Finance and Business Law.
On visiting the website we found a message saying we needed to register before using the full exercises, and went no further, so the rest of this review is about the book. This is laid out 'Murphy Style' with explanations on the left-hand page, and exercises on the right. The exercises are the usual mix of gap-filling, matching exercises, reading comprehension, and so on. The lack of group work suggests that this is a book designed for individual study. There are 16 units in the book, but the last two units take up the whole second half. The first half deals with basic grammar at an advanced level (for eample the first exercise is about the present tense in company mission statements).
The second half of the book concentrates on functions, and is probably the better half. The functions taught include negotiating, giving instructions, complaining and apologising. There are some black and white cartoons, which are mildly amusing.Who is this book for? It seems to be for someone with a good business vocabulary and good grammar, who needs to understand how grammatical structures work. So if you are a business person who wants to spend some time looking at basic grammar in a business context, you may find that this book gives you a good ROI (return on investment). Otherwise, you might do better buying a grammar book, a business studies book, and using the English for Everybody website.
Verdict: Tries to do too much
Assessment 6/10