atw: Harumble for Geoffrey Pullum

Howard Silcock says
>Looking through the book A Student's Introduction to English Grammar by Pullum and Rodney Huddleston, I find it hard to imagine anyone would even think of using it to improve their writing. That would be like trying to improve your singing ability by studying a music theory book. 

Dead right. It's a technical textbook and in no wise a competitor to EOS.
If you want to read something _entertaining_ from Geoffrey Pullum, my favourite grammarian*, see his 'The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language'. (One of them is called 'Here come the linguistic fascists', but despite the promising title, it says nothing about so-called split infinitives.)
Or check him out at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/linguafranca/index/. Unfortunately the podcasts have gone but you can still read the transcripts.
* because he used to be a rock musician (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvQ6U-M6e8A) but says (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/linguafranca/stories/1998/693377.htm) 'I craved excitement. So I turned to grammar.'
Emails sent to this address are deleted unread as an anti-spam measure. 
**************************************************
To view the austechwriter archives, go to 
www.freelists.org/archives/austechwriter

To unsubscribe, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 
"unsubscribe" in the Subject field (without quotes).

To manage your subscription (e.g., set and unset DIGEST and VACATION modes) go 
to www.freelists.org/list/austechwriter

To contact the list administrator, send a message to 
austechwriter-admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
**************************************************

Other related posts: