Mike Hannay en J. Lachlan Mackenzie - Effective Writing in English

Part 1 The process of writing

the irritating errors that can so easily undermine a reader’s otherwise posi tive impression of a text: ■■ Does the layout conform to the reader’s expectations or requirements? ■■ Are there avoidable typing or spelling errors? ■■ Am I sure that all the words have been used appropriately? ■■ Have I taken care to avoid grammatical mistakes?

2.3

Aids to editing

Details on how to answer all the questions in Section 2, and many more, will be provided in the following chapters. Suffice it to say that reliable editing, certainly at Level 3, presupposes the use of various works of reference, nota bly dictionaries, grammars and usage manuals. As far as dictionaries are concerned, you will need to have a good mono lingual English dictionary at your disposal (for non-native users of English, we very much recommend a learner’s dictionary). You should use the dic tionary to ensure that all the words you are uncertain of, and certainly all the words you have mentally translated, have been used properly. A monolingual dictionary will also help you with spelling problems. If you adopt American usage in your writing, take care to use a dictionary that indicates American spelling. Spelling and usage should correspond. All the major learner’s dic tionaries are now available online: see Suggestions for further reading. You should also have a grammar of English to hand. Not every grammar is suitable for editing work, however. Traditional grammars tend to concentrate on unusual or literary constructions, without giving any indication whether they are still in everyday use, while structural grammars aim at giving insight into native speakers’ competence, i.e. displaying what they can potentially do rather than what they do in practice. Neither kind of grammar is particularly useful for editing. Luckily, there are now also so-called communicative gram mars available, which take as their starting point the communicative inten tions that writers (or speakers) have and explain how these can be expressed. In addition, there is a wealth of grammar advice online, much of which is reliable. A usage manual is also an invaluable resource for an editor. Usage is con cerned with what users of a language actually do rather than with questions of grammaticality and ungrammaticality. The following example (which we owe to our colleague Laurie Bauer, of the Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand) should clarify the distinction. Whereas there is nothing ungram matical about saying “Five minutes after half past six”, speakers of English (not the case for Dutch speakers) in fact never say this, but say “Twenty-five minutes to seven”. There is little point in asking why. The conventions of usage simply determine that one grammatical sequence is possible and the

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