The Routledge Student Guide to English Usage is an invaluable A-Z guide to the appropriate use of English in academic contexts.

The first part of the book covers approximately 4000 carefully selected words, focusing on groups of confusable words that sound alike, look alike or are frequently mixed up. The authors help to solve academic dilemmas, such as correct usage of the apostrophe and the crucial difference between infer and imply. Examples of good usage are drawn from corpora such as the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.

The second part covers the key characteristics of formal English in a substantial reference section, comprising:

* stylistic features

* punctuation

* English grammar

* the use of numbers

* email writing.

This is the essential reference text for all students working on improving their academic writing skills. Visit the companion website for a range of supporting exercises: www.routledge.com/cw/clark.

Reviews

Gerard Sharpling, Centre for Applied linguistics, Warwick Uni, UK

Was very enthusiastic, calling it timely, very useful and fulfilling a clear need (see full report in folder):

I believe this will be a very useful book for students in all academic departments at university...I have been looking for this very type of book to use with the students, particularly material on commonly confused words. ..I also think this could be a very useful book for professional writers to use as a 'troubleshooting' device, both at the composition and proofreading/editing stages.. I would be happy to recommend this text for students following academic writing programmes at the University. I note that the book is not intended to be a writing course as such, but writing tutors could easily devise exercises around the content and design tasks that require use of the book. The book will be useful to both undergraduate and postgraduate students, and is the sort of thing, for example, that I would like the university book shop to stock and sell. .. I think this is a very useful and timely proposal. Everyone is becoming more interested in the use of language at university these days, and indeed, it has become something of a political 'hot potato'... I believe the contents of the book are deceptively simple, and this straightforwardness belies a lot of research behind the scenes and considerable experience on the part of the authors.

He only asked for more info on pronunciation which GP is working on already.

Howard Medland, Volda University College, Norway was also very positive:

Essential English Usage' would appear to meet the growing demand for an easily accessible, readable EAP reference work in a handy format that would bridge the gap between the heavier, more traditional works like Fowler's and the wide selection of more 'popular' literature on the subject of good/bad English...

He thinks it will be used:

Certainly as a core text on EAP courses. As a supplementary text on all other general English courses, but in particular courses in any academic discipline in which the working language is English, where students need to improve their productive, written skills...

And likes:

The distinctive and distinguishing feature of 'Essential English Usage' is its comparative approach.. This gives the book a dimension that distinguishes it from most dictionaries, whereby the student reader may immediately find other words and expressions which may cause confusion and misunderstanding, without having to leaf through many pages alphabetically. This is an important feature in facilitating the accessibility and use of the book as a work of reference, and which is invaluable in attracting student readers to the book.

Bruce Morrison, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, was less positive, saying that it was interesting and had a niche market as a supp text, but ultimately needed a radical rethink due to the competition from free online resources, see author's response to this above.

This is a fascinating collection of terms which are almost interchangeable but which have subtle differences. It has elements of a thesaurus but with the added value of tight and distinguishing definitions. It will be of use and interest to anyone who wishes to improve the precision of their writing.

Val Hamilton, Freelance Reviewer, Nethy Bridge, UK

Book Information
ISBN 9781138933590
Author Stewart Clark
Format Paperback
Page Count 402
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 680g