The Complete Plain Words (Paperback)

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Review

The writer who wants to present his ideas clearly and with force by eschewing jargon and sticking to plain words should first read Gowers... --Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher

Product Description

For those who must write to get their work done businessmen and women, students, teachers and librarians; civil servants who have to compose regulations, letters on government business, even signs for public buildings, airports and highways; anyone, in fact, who must be able to put sentences together to make clear a set of facts, requirements or proposals to these busy people, The Complete Plain Words is a necessary companion. It is a proven, trustworthy guide to achieving an accessible style, to say what needs to be said clearly, succinctly, and correctly in whatever they must write day in and day out. When such guides work well, and Gowers is one that works (and reads) very well, they acquire a force and authority that keep the language clear, flexible and responsive to the constant pressure of the workaday world. The core of the book-nine chapters that cover the issues in the choice and handling of words will energize anyone with a writing job to do. The celebrated eighty page alphabetical glossary A checklist: words and phrases to be used with care will save many a writer from committing embarrassing blunders by writing something unintended, misleading or downright foolish.

In 1948 Gowers, a senior British civil servant, was asked by the Treasury to write a book that would improve the written work of government workers in every department. The idea was to combat officialese, that bloated argot of officials that buries meaning more that uncovers it. By 1951 Gowers had two short books, here combined in one, and revised in 1986 by Sidney Greenbaum, Director of the Survey of English Usage and Quain Professor of English at University College, London, and Janet Whitcut, former Senior Research Editor of the Longman Dictionary and Reference Book Unit. The introduction is by Joseph Epstein, Editor of The American Scholar.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: David R Godine (November 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1567922031
• ISBN-13: 978-1567922035
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #945,707 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Though published decades ago,still relevant/useful, March 21, 2002

By	David Mills (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Complete Plain Words (Hardcover)

This book was originally written for bureaucrats so that they might better communicate officialese. Yet it really goes further: it can be used, appreciated, by anyone wishing to improve or confirm their knowledge of written English. Gowers writes in compact, sometimes dryly humourous, style, as he corrects the often confused use of "which-that" and "who-whom", the employment or negligence of the subjunctive, and punctuation. It's an enjoyable,educative work relevant to today, with the English language changing and, perhaps, degrading.

9 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars AVOIDING CATACHRESIS, December 14, 2005

By	DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

`Catachresis' is a simple Greek word meaning `misuse'. If you had never come across it in English before, neither had I until I read it in the second chapter of this book, where it is displayed proudly in the course of a lesson to us on the correct use of the word `jargon'. The first edition of the book appeared in 1948, and it has reappeared in at least 5 revisions and reprints, my own copy dating from 1964. It must have sold well in that case, and while it purports to be trying to teach the British civil service how to write clearly, the author soon forgets this limited aim and treats us to yet another enthusiastic handbook on the proper use of English, a field I had thought well and truly ploughed and reploughed by Fowler, Quiller-Couch, A P Herbert and others. This is how it will have been read by its eager public, and so this is how it should be assessed. Half a century is not nearly long enough for such a work to go out of date, but of course a lot of the interest in reading it today is precisely in seeing how well it has stood the test of so many years, particularly in the age of email. However I found it even more interesting from a sociological viewpoint. `Who's talking?' I kept asking myself. Who feels like pontificating in print on this subject, and why should the rest of us take any notice?

We can forget the ostensible objective. Who on earth supposes that the language of the civil service is even trying to be clear much of the time? Whitehall mandarins write memos designed in the main to cover their rear, just as commercial executives do. When clarity is really their aim, it is perfectly compatible with lumpish expression, bad grammar, bad syntax, bad spelling and bad handwriting. The best-crafted English in the world will not make what they say unambiguous in a court of law, as is memorably shown by the story of the use of cleaning-rags `in shops and places other than shops'. You, I and they might have thought that covered all possibilities, but not according to the judge who ruled that a mobile ice-cream tricycle was not a place. This book is really just another guide to good English, for the general public. As such, it is intelligent, balanced, stylish, clear and good-humoured. Gowers is neither pedantic nor unduly tolerant of shoddy writing. He understands that a language is a living thing, and he does his best to judge which neologisms are part of the organic development of the language and which are pimples and warts that could do with removing. Any educated reader with an ear for the language and a love of the language could probably do as well as he does, and I wonder what he would have made of the use of `rendition' in 2005. I feel he is wasting his breath with his complaints about philosophers' idiom at the start of chapter 8 - philosophers have to write they way they do, just as lawyers have to. Checking his tastes against my own, I find us largely in agreement. I shall go to my final reckoning innocent of using `anticipate' to mean `expect', or `aftermath' to mean `outcome'. On the other hand I think he overdoes his objection to `feasible' in the sense of `plausible', and I can't see that `the troops were issued with rations' is any worse than `the troops were given rations', but I shall correct my use of `comprise' in future in accordance with his strictures. I also agree that brevity makes for clarity, but it has its pitfalls too, as in a recipe that told me `remove dish from oven and stand on a hot plate', or as in the exam question `What can be said with confidence about...?' which got the answer `Anything. Just say it with confidence'. And I wondered during chapter 8 whether the author was familiar with the term `agglutinative', which gives respectability to expressions consisting entirely of nouns, e.g. `city dockside warehouse fire'.

Who's telling us all this anyhow? It's not just Ernest Gowers, it's Sir Ernest Gowers. Anyone using his title like this invites derision. Did his wife say to him at breakfast `Would you like more toast, Sir Ernest?', or perhaps, in those tender intimate moments, `That was wonderful, Sir Ernest, how was it for you?' The whole attitude underlying the book is a memorial of an era when Whitehall was the High Indaba of the British establishment. Future Sir Ernests took firsts in classics at Cambridge, joined the civil service and were later appointed to chair the Coal Mines Reorganisation Commission (later the Coal Commission) and similar. They were the mandarin administrators of Clement Attlee's socialist commonwealth of Britain and they lived by the gospel of Whitehall Knows Best. They recruited and assessed their successors in the manner of wine-experts judging a grand cru, and they brought a similar fastidiousness to their style of writing. Clarity was important mainly for giving them a criterion in criticising the writing of other civil servants, what really mattered was a special elevated style, or what they took for such a style. Out of hours they wrote, and - worse - read, articles and letters of dumbfounding pomposity in The Times newspaper expounding this or that nicety in the use of English. They were clever men (mainly), they were upright and dedicated men, they were highly educated men, but the mystery to me in retrospect is why equally educated members of the general public ever took seriously the pretensions of any chairman of the Coal Mines Reorganisation Commission (later the Coal Commission) to special expertise in the use of English. If I had at any stage been the boss of the future Sir Ernest on his way up and had caught him wrestling with The Choice of Words or such like preoccupations in His Majesty's time and at the taxpayer's expense, I think my own words to him would have been a model of the clarity he values so highly, and they would have been `Get on with what you're paid to do'.