Bryson is against pomposity and in favour of clarity and brevity...Waugh would find much to surprise and please him here.

Your favourite transplanted American (and mine) has ventured into the field of Linguistic Guidance for Limeys...Language lovers...should raise three cheers.

A very personal reference tool from the desk of bestselling author Bill Bryson.

What is the difference between cant and jargon, or assume and presume? What is a fandango? What's the new name for Calcutta? How do you spell supersede? Boutros Boutros-Ghali? Is it hippy or hippie? These questions really matter to Bill Bryson, ever since his days as a rookie subeditor on "The Times" back in the 1970s: as they do to anyone who cares about the English language.Originally published as "The Penguin Dictionary for Writers and Editors", Bryson's "Dictionary for Writers and Editors" has now been completely revised and updatedfor the twenty-first century by Bill Bryson himself. Here is a very personal selection of spellings and usages, covering such head-scratchers as capitalization, plurals, abbreviations and foreign names and phrases. Bryson also gives us the difference between British and American usages, and miscellaneous pieces of essential information you never knew you needed, like the names of all the Oxford colleges, or the new name for the Department of Trade and Industry - or the correct spelling of Brobdingnag. An indispensable companion to all those who write, work with the written word, or who just enjoy getting things right, it gives rulings that are both authoritative and commonsense, all in Bryson's own inimitably good humoured way.

What is the difference between cant and jargon, or assume and presume? What is a fandango? What's the new name for Calcutta? How do you spell supersede? Boutros Boutros-Ghali? Is it hippy or hippie? These questions really matter to Bill Bryson, ever since his days as a rookie subeditor on "The Times" back in the 1970s: as they do to anyone who cares about the English language.Originally published as "The Penguin Dictionary for Writers and Editors", Bryson's "Dictionary for Writers and Editors" has now been completely revised and updatedfor the twenty-first century by Bill Bryson himself. Here is a very personal selection of spellings and usages, covering such head-scratchers as capitalization, plurals, abbreviations and foreign names and phrases. Bryson also gives us the difference between British and American usages, and miscellaneous pieces of essential information you never knew you needed, like the names of all the Oxford colleges, or the new name for the Department of Trade and Industry - or the correct spelling of Brobdingnag.

An indispensable companion to all those who write, work with the written word, or who just enjoy getting things right, it gives rulings that are both authoritative and commonsense, all in Bryson's own inimitably good humoured way.

Bill Bryson's bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Neither Here nor There, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods and Down Under.His acclaimed book on popular science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and won the Aventis Prize for Science Books andthe Descartes Science Communication Prize.He has written on language in Mother Tongue, Made in America and Troublesome Words, and his latest bestsellers are Shakespeare (in the Eminent Lives series) and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.

2008-05-20 Why Bother?

According to the copyright page, "earlier editions" of this book were published in England as "The Penguin Dictionary for Writers and Editors" more than 15 years ago. According to Bryson's preface, it's intended as a "quick, concise guide to the problems of English spelling and usage most commonly encountered by writers and editors" and "is a personal collection, built up over thirty years..." That's all well and good, but since its original publication, a little thing called the internet has come along and rendered a good deal of the contents rather superfluous. For example, it's hard to imagine that anyone seeking the correct spelling of "suggestible" or "sulfur" would turn to page 322 of this book to learn the proper sequence of letters. For one thing, it would be vastly inefficient to turn to Bryson's "personal collection" every time a spelling question arose on the off chance his spelling problems matched yours. More to the point, there are any number of reliable online dictionaries one could use instead. Similarly, the book is full of names and one-line bios of famous and semi-famous people (ranging on page 323 from Nobel prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi to Patrick Swayze). Again, why hope that Bryson has an entry on a particular person as opposed to a quick check online at any number of reliable sources? And so on, from various foreign-language terms to geographic locations, abbreviations, etc. The only area where Bryson "adds value" is those entries which evoke a more lengthy discussion of usage, however he's already written a book on usage (Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words), so one might as well rely on that (or any number of other excellent usage guides). On the whole, this book doesn't appear to hold much utility for the average writer or editor (both of which I have been), whose bookshelves and internet bookmarks will likely already contain the tools to address any of the entries in this book. Rather, it appears to be an ill-advised attempt by the publisher to cash in on the Bryson brand.