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Apostrophes – how to use them

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Apostrophes – definition

apostrophes Apostrophes are shown by a raised comma — like this ( ‘ ).

redbtn Apostrophes are used to show possession and to punctuate contractions.

Examples

Possession– My mother’s house – The girl’s bicycle

The house belongs to my mother – The bicycle belongs to the girl

Contractions– There’s nobody here – Where’s Freddy?

There is nobody here – Where is Freddy?

Use

redbtn We can write The tail of the dog or The dog’s tail. This is possession – when something belongs to someone or something.

redbtn We can also write It is a lovely day or It’s a lovely day. This is contraction – when two words are merged. The apostrophe is used to denote the missing letter.

redbtn NB! Many people have problems with the apostrophe. [You’re not alone.] Read on!

Possession

redbtn When the possessor is single we indicate possession by using an apostrophe followed by the letter s:

The man’s coat
my sister’s hat

redbtn When the possessors are plural, the apostrophe is placed after the final s:

The girls’ bicycles
my cousins’ parents

redbtn When names end with the letter ‘s’, either use is acceptable:

James’ wife or
James’s wife

redbtn [It is often said that the choice between the two should be made on how the word is pronounced.]

redbtn The apostrophe is never used with possessive pronouns:

his – hers – its – ours – yours – theirs

redbtn But it is used with one: One must do one’s best.

redbtn Note that the apostrophe is not required where a word has been formed by omitting its first part:

bus – not – ‘bus [from omnibus]

phone – not – ‘phone [from telephone]

redbtn No apostrophe is required in the plural form of numbers and dates:

in the 1920s
the roaring twenties

Contractions

redbtn In formal writing we would write She has always loved him, but when speaking we would probably say She’s always loved him. The apostrophe is used to indicate the missing letters (or sounds).

I’m (I am)    He’s (He is)    You’re (You are)

redbtn Notice the difference between it’s (it is) and its (belonging to it).

redbtn NB! There is no such thing as its’

redbtn The use of contractions tends to make writing less formal.

redbtn It is just possible that the apostrophe will be the next linguistic feature to disappear from common use.

redbtn It causes lots of problems, and in most cases the context would make the meaning clear even if it were missing.

redbtn It is in fact a relic from the days when English was an inflected language. This may be a reason for the problems, and it would form some justification for its disappearance.

Self-assessment quiz follows >>>

© Roy Johnson 2003

English Language 3.0 program
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Articles – how to use them

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Articles – definition

articles Articles go in front of nouns.

redbtn There are two types of articles in English:

  • the definite article [the]
  • the indefinite article [a or an].
Examples

The definite article is the — as in the book

The indefinite article is a – as in a pencil

or an — as in an apple

Use

redbtn When using the indefinite article a is used before

redbtn an is used when the noun begins with a vowel.

redbtn This convention is based on ease of speaking. It is easier to say an apple than a apple, and a new book than an new book.

redbtn The definite article the remains the same in all cases, although speakers do vary the pronunciation according to whether a vowel or a consonant follows. For example:

[thee] – the other – the argument

[theu] – the ball – the tent

redbtn NB! Just be thankful the article is gender-free in English. [It’s not in other languages.]

redbtn Articles in English are fairly simple compared with some other European languages. English articles vary only according to ease of speaking, whereas in French they have to agree with the gender of the noun. For example

MASCULINE le bureau
(the office)		 le matin
(the morning)
FEMININE la maison
(the house)		 la plage
(the beach)

redbtn Students of English as a foreign language are relieved to find that the articles stay fairly constant with the exception of the variation between a and an.

redbtn However, English wasn’t always like this. Old English or Anglo-Saxon had as many variations as Latin or modern German. These have very gradually disappeared as word-order has become more crucial.

redbtn Even today, some people say an historic occasion or an hotel. This is a remnant of Middle English when, because of the French influence, the aitch was not articulated, making the initial syllables of these words effectively vowels. [End of history lesson.]

Self-assessment quiz follows >>>

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Assonance – how to understand it

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Assonance – definition

assonance Assonance is a figure of speech featuring the repetition of vowel sounds.

redbtn The repetitions are usually close together, to create a euphonious effect.

Examples

‘The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.’

‘We love to spoon ‘neath the moon in June.’

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye

[TENNYSON – ‘The Lady of Shalott’]

Use

redbtn You can see from these examples that the device is used a lot in song lyrics and poetry.

redbtn Because the vowels are ‘open’ sounds, it creates a generally soothing effect.

redbtn The repeated sound also makes the text easy to memorise.

redbtn It is also popular in advertising, for the same reasons.

redbtn NB! This device can easily become cloying.

redbtn The repetition of vowel sounds creates rhyme and a generally soothing effect.

redbtn Phonologically, it is interesting to note that the same sound may be represented by different combinations of letters:

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye

redbtn The same sound here is produced by /ei/, /i/, /ie/, and /ye/.

Self-assessment quiz follows >>>>

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Audience – how to understand it

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Audience – definition

audience Audience is a term used to refer to the reader of a text, or the listener to what we say.

redbtn The audience might be any of the following:

single person
selected
specialist
all the same kind		 group of people
random or accidental
non-specialist
very mixed
Examples
Personal letter single selected
Note to milkman single specialist
MA dissertation single specialist targeted
Insurance claim group selected specialist
Novel group random non-specialist
Use

redbtn The main purpose of speaking or writing is to communicate.

redbtn An awareness of audience helps to make speech or writing more effective.

redbtn Efficient writers and effective speakers target their audience as clearly as possible.

redbtn NB! Sometimes a piece of writing may have more than one audience.

redbtn An awareness of your audience is a critical factor in efficient communication for both speech and writing.

redbtn Efficiency can be improved by choosing the vocabulary, tone, and style which are appropriate for the audience.

redbtn Publishers, advertisers, poets, and novelists all target their readers or listeners.

redbtn The vocabulary of a newspaper is chosen very carefully with its readership in mind.

redbtn Radio and television programmes adapt their use of language to their target audiences.

redbtn We write letters to our friends in a style which is different to that we use for the bank manager or someone we don’t know.

redbtn If someone stops you to ask for directions, they won’t be interested in how long you’ve lived in the town, and what it used to look like before the War. On the other hand, if you’re a member of the History Society you may be invited to give a half-hour lecture on that very topic. Your audience is different in each case.

Self-assessment quiz follows >>>

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Better Wordpower

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learn how words are formed, written, and used

Better Wordpower is a popular language guide based on a simple notion – that a deeper grasp of language and the way words are used is the sure route to more efficient and effective communication. It offers several different approaches to what Reader’s Digest used to call Improve your Wordpower. It begins by showing you how to use dictionaries, encyclopedias and other language books effectively.

Better Wordpower Then it goes through the basic rules of spelling; lists of words which are commonly confused (affect and effect for instance); a list of foreign words and phrases; and a list of antonyms – words which mean the opposite, as in eager and apathetic or winsome and repulsive.

One of the most useful sections for increasing your wordpower is that listing prefixes and suffixes (what they call ‘word parts’) which help in the formation of new terms (auto- self, or automatic – as in autobiography, automobile or -ectomy surgical removal – as in vasectomy, appendectomy).

This is followed by an explanation of words used in common areas of human activity – animal life, architecture, art, astronomy, botany, computers, diseases, finance, geology, language, mathematics, music, physics and chemistry, psychology and psychiatry, shipping, and weather.

There are even illustrations in these sections, making the book like a mini-encyclopedia. Some of these categories seem somewhat arbitrary, but at least they point the user in the direction of intellectual categories – which is one of the prime purposes of the book.

The compilation ends with another very useful list of difficult, obscure, and what they call ‘hard’ words. These range from the reasonably well-known (alopecia ‘baldness’) to more abstruse terms such as (loricate ‘having an armour of scales or plates’).

All in all, it’s an accessible and readable guide which helps you through some of the most common pitfalls and complications of the English language. Ideally suitable for beginners, users in the classroom, or self-improvers of any kind.

Better Wordpower   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Better Wordpower   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005

Janet Whitcut, Better Wordpower, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp.329, ISBN: 0192801082

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Bloomsbury Concise Dictionary

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a dictionary which is also an encyclopedia

There’s a great deal of competition amongst dictionaries and encyclopedias these days. You can buy the New Oxford Dictionary for the price of a couple of hardback books; Encarta comes cheap enough; and you can even get the whole of Encyclopedia Britannica on disk for less than a tenner. So any serious contender as a desktop reference work must have something special to offer in order to be taken seriously. And the Bloomsbury Concise Dictionary does that by packing in an amazing number of extra features – which is what makes it something of a hybrid, combining the basic data you expect in a conventional dictionary with some of the features of an encyclopedia.

Bloomsbury Concise DictionaryIt offers what it calls ‘quick definitions’, which are summaries of the different meanings a word can have. These are useful for navigating through longer entries. Almost every entry is also given a cross reference or labelled with a category to which it belongs. I think I see the influence of hyperlinking at work here. In fact there is quite a lot of visual novelty, because font size, emphasis, and bullet points are used to guide you through the explanations of terms.

The most obvious feature which stands out and I think makes the book attractive is the use of illustrations, maps, tables, and diagrams. It’s obviously more helpful to show a map of the Czech Republic, rather than describing where it is geographically.

For those people who want to use a dictionary to help them improve their use of English, there are all sorts of aids to language and its problems. There is a spellcheck feature which draws attention to words whose spelling is unusual or problematic. Words are placed into a context to demonstrate how they are correctly used. There are notes on grammar, pronunciation, and issues of style and levels of formality. A typical entry runs as follows:

intrigue n/in treeg, in treég/ 1 SECRET PLOTTING secret scheming or plotting 2 SECRET PLOT a secret scheme or plot 3 SECRET LOVE AFFAIR a secret love affair (archaic) • v/in treeg/ (-trigues, -triguing, -trigued) 1 vt INTEREST to make somebody greatly interested or curious 2 vi SCHEME to scheme or use underhand methods to achieve something [Early 17C Via French < Italian intrigo < intrigare ‘entangle’ < Latin intricare (see INTRICATE) —intriguer /in treegar/ n —intriguingly vi

In terms of lexicon, the main body of the work is drawn from the Bloomsbury Corpus of World English, which now has a database of over 150 million words. There is a substantial proportion of recently-coined terms in evidence – so you can be confident of finding (for instance) an explanation of the technological sense of backbone [the core of an electronic network] along with its biological sense of ‘spinal column’.

And if all that isn’t enough, there are also panels giving what they call ‘quick facts’ on subjects such as the Baroque period in architecture and the Human Genome project. These give the key names, dates, publications, and technologies involved. So, with 220,000 word definitions and 8,000 entries on people and places, I doubt if it would be possible to pack much more into a desktop reference book of this kind.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Bloomsbury Concise Dictionary   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Bloomsbury Concise English Dictionary, London: A & C Black, 2nd edn, 2005, pp.1687, ISBN: 0713674997

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Brackets – how to use them

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Brackets – definition

brackets Brackets are used to show that a word or phrase has been inserted into a sentence.

redbtn The technical name for this device is a ‘parenthesis’.

Examples
  • Most of the suspects (seven in all) were questioned by the police.
  • Put your scrap paper (or cardboard) into the dustbin.
  • The next person to arrive (a very attractive woman) caused a sensation.
Use

redbtn The words inserted between brackets are usually an explanation, an illustration, or an aside.

redbtn They often carry the meaning ‘that is to say’.

redbtn NB! Brackets are always used in pairs. Once they are ‘open’, don’t forget to close them.

redbtn Round brackets are used to represent an aside or an extra piece of information which is closely related to the main subject of the sentence.

Goodwin argues that Thompson’s policies (which he clearly dislikes) would only increase the problem.

redbtn Square brackets are used to indicate that something
is being added by the author. This is usually for clarification or comment.

The reporter added that the woman [Mrs Wood] had suffered severe injuries.

A mother wrote that her son was ‘fritened [sic] to go to school’.

redbtn When brackets are used at the end of a sentence, the full stop falls outside the bracket (like this).

redbtn Statements inside brackets should be grammatically separate from the sentence. That is, the sentence should be complete, even if the contents of the brackets are removed.

The republican senator (who was visiting London for a minor operation) also attended the degree ceremony.

redbtn If a quotation contains a mistake in the original you can indicate that the error is not your own. This is indicated by the use of square brackets.

The senior government minister who was recently acquitted of kerb-crawling claimed that at long last his ‘trails [sic] and tribulations’ were at an end.

redbtn The expressions within brackets should be kept as brief as possible, so as not to interrupt the flow of the sentence.

redbtn The use of brackets should be kept to a minimum. If used too frequently, they create a choppy, unsettling effect.

Self-assessment quiz follows >>>

© Roy Johnson 2003

English Language 3.0 program
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Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable

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famous encyclopedia of references and sources

Who were Gargantua’s parents? What are ‘naughty figs’? And what is the origin of the pub name, ‘The Dog and Duck’? It’s no use looking in a dictionary to answer questions like these – and if you pick up an encyclopedia, where would you start? What you need is an old, old favourite reference manual for the humanities – Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & FableIt is a compilation of people, places, sayings, customs, and mythology – first published by the Reverend Ebenezer Cobham Brewer in 1870 and massively popular with writers, readers, and crossword-puzzle fans ever since. Brewer was a clergyman-scholar who wrote books on popular education and literature. He drew the bulk of his materials from his reading of the classics.

But to this is added a now-quaint Victorian gloss of the public school polymath. Adrian Room, the editor of this latest version, has introduced French jargon, inkhorn literary terms, and many more historical and fictional characters to those legendary, mythical, and fabulous creatures in the original.

Sometimes Brewer’s entries are so blindingly obvious, you wonder why they were included [‘Fore’ – in the front rank; eminent] but most of the time his examples are very entertaining. A section on ‘Death from Strange Causes’ includes ‘Aeschylus was killed by the fall of a tortoise on his bald head from the claws of an eagle in the air’ and ‘Margutte died of laughter on seeing a monkey trying to pull on a pair of boots’. To this he adds the footnote: ‘It will be observed that four of the last died of laughter. No doubt the reader will be able to add other examples.’

He is particularly good at explaining the historical origins and the symbolic connotations of things we often take for granted, such as pub names, expressions such as ‘too bandy about’ and the hidden meanings in such expressions as ‘a game-leg’. The compilation is also stuffed with potted biographies of Biblical, mythical, and fictional characters, along with all sorts of other ‘knowledge – from the origins of the letter ‘A’, to the note on Zulfagar, which turns out to be the name of Ali’s sword – Ali of course being the cousin and son-in-law of Mahomet.

As you can probably tell, it’s an interesting mixture of really useful reference material and slightly dotty erudition. But it’s that which gives the book its charm. It’s the sort of compilation which when you look up a reference, you can hardly stop yourself reading through lots of the adjacent entries and marvelling at the breadth of learning it represents. It’s the only work of reference I can think of in which you’re guaranteed a laugh on just about every page.

© Roy Johnson 2012

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, London: Chambers, 19th revised edition 2012, pp.1536, ISBN: 0550102450

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Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language

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history, grammar, and use of world’s languages

If you take a close interest in language, a dictionary alone is sometimes not enough. You occasionally need a book like this which can explain basics. It isn’t an encyclopaedia in the normal sense: it’s a very readable series of articles, essays, definitions, tables, maps and pictures on every conceivable aspect of languages from around the world. In fact it’s the only reference book of its kind I’ve ever read all the way through, from start to finish. David Crystal has devoted his life to the study of language, and of all his many books on the subject, his Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language is the one to which I return most often.

Encyclopedia of Language It’s a wonderful compendium of easily accessible information on all aspects of language, and there are gems of information on every page. It is written in a lively, non-pedantic style, and is profusely illustrated in such a way as to reinforce our understanding and make it more interesting.

He offers a very readable and humane way to introduce anyone to the wonders and mysteries of human language. He covers topics such as the origins and diversity of languages; the differences between the spoken and the written word; phonetics, semantics, and stylistics; the contentious issues of pronunciation, accent, dialect, and slang; alphabets, dictionaries, and thesauri; language acquisition and language change; grammar, spelling systems, and graphology. If it’s remotely connected with language, you will find it here – explained in a straightforward and often quite amusing manner.

I’ve used this book regularly ever since it first appeared. In fact it oscillates between office and home. The first version appeared in 1987, but you should make sure you get the latest second edition, because David Crystal has added material which takes into account the linguistic changes wrought in the decade since the original’s inception. It also includes a comprehensive glossary of terms and long lists of suggestions for further reading. There’s everything here you will need until you are ready to study language at quite an advanced level.

© Roy Johnson 2010

Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3rd edn 2010, pp.524, ISBN: 0521736501

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Capital letters – how to use them

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Capital letters – definition

capital letters Capital letters are used to show the importance of particular words.

redbtn They are always used for proper nouns (people’s names) ; at the start of sentences ; and for places and events of a public nature.

Examples
  • He entered the room, accompanied by Christine Bowman.
  • John wrote a letter to the Bishop of Chester.
  • We will visit Sherwood Forest at Easter this year.
Use

redbtn Capital letters are always placed at the beginning of a sentence.

redbtn They are also used to indicate names and titles, as well as holidays and well-known public places.

redbtn NB! Avoid continuous capitals.

THEY LOOK VERY UNSIGHTLY AND ARE HARD TO READ

redbtn Capitals are used to denote the names of particular or special things.

days of the week Wednesday, Friday
places East Anglia
rivers the river Mersey
buildings the Tate Gallery
institutions the Catholic Church
firms British Aerospace
organisations the National Trust
months of the year April, September

redbtn However, when such terms are used as adjectives or in a general sense, no capital is required:

the King James Bible / a biblical reference

Oxford University / a university education

the present Government / governments since 1967

redbtn Capitals are used when describing intellectual movements or periods of history:

Freudian – Platonism – Cartesian – the Middle Ages
the Reformation – the Enlightenment

redbtn They are also used in the titles of books, plays, films, newspapers, magazines, songs, and works of art in general. The normal convention is to capitalise the first word and any nouns or important terms. Smaller words such as ‘and’, ‘of’, and ‘the’ are left uncapitalised:

A View from the Bridge
The Mayor of Casterbridge
North by Northwest
The Marriage of Figaro

redbtn Notice the difference between the same term used in a general and a particular sense:

The children’s Uncle Fred is seventy.
Their uncle is the oldest in the family.

Self-assessment quiz follows >>>

© Roy Johnson 2003

English Language 3.0 program
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