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Grammar and Style at your Fingertips | |
Publisher: Alpha
Author: Lara M. Robbins
US$16.95 (approx)
ISBN 978-1592576579
The 'At your fingertips' series produces handy guides to an ever-increasing number of topics, including personal finance and accounting. Since these publishers are not English Language professionals, they have taken the sensible step of getting a senior managing editor at Berkeley to write the text. The result is a very clear and well-organized guide to writing English. Note though, that this is not a text book, but a guide. It tells you much of what you need to know, but it covers such a wide range that anyone needing in-depth information on a particular subject will need to look elsewhere. But thanks to its clear and logical layout this book is a very useful starting-point for locating what information is needed to understand, for example, passive constructions. The book even has a useful bibliography of further reading.
The book has 290 pages of text, divided into fourteen chapters. These chapters are marked by bars printed onto the edge of the page, so it is easy to locate a particular chapter by simply looking at the book edge-on. The first chapters get down to the basics of English grammar, starting with Nouns. These chapters are in turn divided into sub-sections, so that, for example, chapter sub-head 1.3 is 'pronouns'. This lists nine types of pronouns, with examples of each. One weakness of the book is that it is so compressed that at times it reads simply like a list of definitions of grammatical terms. (Fortunately, one of the appendices at the end lists these terms in alphabetical order.) As the chapters progress, the reader is taken swiftly through Verbs and Modifiers, and by chapter six sentence structure and pronunciation have been covered. So the reader who was looking at definitions of a noun in chapter one is, by the later chapters, dealing with copy-editing and proof-reading. This is a big jump, which suggests that not all chapters will be useful to any one reader. On the positive side, the book understands that its users are in the digital age, and explains when it is good style to use bold text, small capitals and italics when writing with a word processor. There are no pictures or friendly cartoons - and while the book is elegantly written, it can seem a little dry at times.
Who is this book for? It is certainly not for a beginner EFL student. The two groups who will benefit most from this book are those who speak English as natives but were never taught formal grammar, and those advanced EFL students who need to remind themselves about a particular type of grammar. The sections on style will benefit all English users, be they students or native speakers, as the book does an excellent job of showing how to write clearly and expressively.
Verdict: A companion, not a textbook
Assessment 7/10