"The Truth About English Grammar"

It's past time for me to feature Geoff Pullum's new book, The Truth About English Grammar. The publisher's blurb:

Do you worry that your understanding of English grammar isn’t what it should be? It may not be your fault. For hundreds of years, vague and confused ideas about how to state the rules have been passed down from one generation to the next. The available books for the general reader – thousands of them, shamelessly plagiarizing each other – repeat the same misguided definitions and generalizations that appeared in the schoolbooks used by your great-great-grandparents.

Geoffrey K. Pullum thinks you deserve better. In this book he breaks away from the tradition. Presupposing no prior knowledge or technical terms, he provides an informal introduction to the essential concepts underlying grammar and usage. With his foundation, you will be equipped to understand the classification of words, the structure of phrases and clauses, and why some supposed grammar rules are really just myths. Also covered are some of the key points about spelling, apostrophes, hyphens, capitalization, and punctuation.

Illuminating, witty, and incisive, The Truth About English Grammar is a vital book for all who love writing, reading, and thinking about English.

The start of the preface:

If you have ever been led to believe that your grammar is bad, relax a little. This book aims to liberate you, not berate you. Its main aim is to lay out some of the most basic principles of grammar from the ground up, without presupposing any previous acquaintance, and to lay out those principles in a more modern and consistent way. But it also to some extent aims to free you from fears of accidentally violating grammar and being judged for it. Far too many alleged “grammatical errors” aren’t mistakes at all: they presuppose rules that don’t exist and never did.

And the start of the final section, with the header Disrecommendations:

Now for a few remarks that are just between you, me, and the gatepost. It may upset millions, but I owe it to you to speak the truth. Some of the most famous and much-loved books on how to write are grossly misinformed on grammar and usage, not to be trusted on style, and way past their use-by dates, which are spread across the 20th century.

A flagrant case is the book commonly known as The Elements of Style. It’s actually E.B. White’s revision and expansion of a 1918 book by William Strunk called Elements of Style, which White was assigned when he was in one of Strunk’s classes at Cornell in 1919. Parts of it were four decades old when White published his version with Macmillan in 1959, and they are over a century old now, after several more editions by different publishers. Much of what it says about grammar and usage is very bad advice, and some of White’s changes and additions (which Strunk never saw) are flagrant nonsense – like when White says that stranding a preposition “sounds like murder” (4th edition, page 78). Stay away from this book.

George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language” (1946) is an essay, not a book, but millions of students will have seen it in a book because it was reprinted at least 118 times in 325 editions of fifty-eight college readers between 1952 and 1996 (see “The essay canon” by Lynn Bloom in College English 61.4, 1999, 401–430). Its text can be found in scores of places on the web, and hordes of English teachers have been singing its praises for three-quarters of a century. It is full of sanctimonious virtue signaling, dishonestly cherry-picked examples, and dumb advice about writing that no one follows, like that you should never use any familiar phrase, and of course that you should never use the passive (when his own essay uses the passive far more than most writing in English does). My advice: don’t even read it, but if an English teacher asks, pretend you think it’s wonderful.

John McIntyre, "It's a grand day for grammar", 9/5/2024:

In the fifth through eighth grades, I was drilled in the traditional schoolroom grammar by two formidable ladies, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, and while their results with other students were variable, what they taught me stuck. 

Over years as an editor it was brought home to me that the schoolroom grammar was seriously flawed. Originally developed to apply Latin grammar to English, a bad fit because the two languages operate on different principles, but Latin was the prestige language when English was the new kid on the block. Over the centuries that grammar was distorted by an accretion of arbitrary rules and superstitions that have been exposed by linguists. But those of us who had the schoolroom grammar had little or no contact with the linguists. 

Now we can. The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum, has just been published in this country by Polity Press. Pullum, the distinguished linguist and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, speaks not as the scribes and Pharisees but as one who has authority, and bridges the gap between the traditional grammar and current linguists in a short, concise book accessible to any reader willing to put in a little time.

As the new book states explicitly, it's basically a more accessible introduction to Geoff's earlier, longer, and denser work:

The first port of call for anyone who wants to delve more seriously into this book’s modern approach to English grammar would be A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar by Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Brett Reynolds (2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 2022). It’s a 400-page undergraduate-level textbook that’s fully compatible with this book in its theoretical assumptions, but it goes into a lot more detail. It’s not elementary, but then if you have read this book you are not exactly a beginner anymore.

That textbook is based on a much larger and more advanced work: The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum et al., Cambridge University Press, 2002) – the book I’ve been referring to as CGEL. It’s a large scholarly reference work (over 1,800 pages), and although it doesn’t presuppose a linguistics degree, it uses more technical concepts and vocabulary than this book, and it attempts to be complete and exhaustive. It’s intended for grammarians and designers of courses rather than for students or for the casual reader.