Book review: Practical English Usage by Michael Swan

What I found in the news on my bookshelf
Now available both  as a book or as an app (2013) for Android  or iOS, in the third edition of Micheal Swan's Practical English Usage, published by Oxford University Press in 2005, the author brings together a comprehensive selection of important points in English grammar for students of both informal, communicative oriented versions and of more formal or academic versions of modern English. He gives clear explanations with numerous examples to show the grammar point in action; in addition, there are frequent examples of incorrect usage, clearly marked as such with struck through formatting, to help correct some of the more common misunderstandings.

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My response
I also enjoy browsing, or researching a grammar point in more detail, the more substantial grammars of English The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum and Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartik's A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, whose author's work we used to call "the punk grammar of English" when I was at university. These large works provide some fascinating insights into the workings of English from usefully differing approaches to the subject by their respective expert authors.

Swan on was/were in unreal conditionals

But when I have an actual question about the best way to write something, I usually refer first to my copy of Michael Swan's excellent reference grammar Practical English Usage, now in its third edition. Actually, I usually go for the more convenient and much lighter app version. For example, when I saw that Rogers and Wilkin (2013, p. 64) were explicitly advising the use of was rather than were for present unreal conditionals using be, Swan was the first thing I checked, even though I knew what he said. I guess I wanted to reassure myself that the text had not magically changed in some sinister Orwellian way under the influence of a malign Big Brother with power to rule in the present by rewriting the past. The screen shot shown here also includes, in §258.5 Swan also explains the point that prompted me to opt for real rather than an unreal conditional in my recent blog post on the imminent arrival of autonomous cars on the roads.

Swan on so

However, since Swan is happy to allow that Rogers and Wilkin are not wrong, he does not give any examples of struck out formatting to help readers correct possible mistakes. For that, let's look at a common among AUA students both in the AEP program and in the General Writing classes, the use of so to mean "very." Swan takes six pages, §§ 536 - 544, to cover the varied ways that English uses the word so. The screen shot from by tablet shows, in points 2 and 3, that so is not used in academic or more formal versions of English to mean, and the examples of incorrect use in point 4. help to clarify how the confusion might have arisen.

If you are looking for a solid reference grammar that covers modern English well without too much confusing details, Swan's Practical English Usage is the one I recommend. In the meantime, I wish everything was available in app or online versions: picking up either of the other two grammars I like gives me a serious muscle workout.

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References

Rogers, L. & Wilkin, J. (2013). Skillful Reading and Writing Students Book 2. London: Macmillan Education.

Swan, M. (2013). Practical English Usage (3rd ed., version 1.0.9) Oxford University Press. [Mobile application software]. Retrieved from https://play.google.com/store