English for Lovers of English

Comments on English Usage for Advanced Learners

In this book, I have brought together about 1,400 utterances that are faulty. None of these faulty utterances have been produced by me to illustrate incorrect use of English. All the faulty utterances found in this book have been taken from printed materialmostly from the newspapers I read. In order to focus attention on the error, I have shortened some of the faulty utterances. To me, it is very important that the faulty utterances in this book have not been produced by me. Jacques Barzun, the celebrated American scholar and recipient of the Gold Medal for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters has something very pertinent to say on genuine faults as opposed to faults that have been produced as sample utterances. This is what Barzun says: In student writing, when the assignments are frequent and well designed, all kinds of error and clumsiness occur that are never found in the sample sentences of manuals and grammar books. These faults have the advantage of being genuine; they represent somebodys way of thought, and finding them faulty is a therapeutic attack on the mind that produced them. Barzun is talking about writing done by university students in America, but what he says about it is applicable to a great deal of Indian writing too.