Personal Blogs

I have now finished reading "The Student's Guide to Writing" by Peck and Coyle, published by Palgrave (2005).

I deliberately read this book out of curiosity about the approach and the dating of the material about style.  It is by no means the first book about correct English that I have read.  As I expected, it taught me virtually nothing that I did not know already.

The authors have taken an approach which is simple, stepwise, and uncontroversial.  They refer to their own experiences of teaching at Cardiff University, and the weight of this experience is reflected in the way the book is written.  The most obvious example of this is the complete absence of any exercises.  There is a brief explanation of this, which is the simple observation that nobody would ever do them - which is true.

If you are a student (from any discipline) who feels nervous about writing essays, or has problems with disentangling the things you want to express from the words you use to express them, or if you think that your written work is not as correct as it might be, then this is the book for you.  If you already know the difference between a preposition and an adverb of place, then you are unlikely to gain anything from it. 

The book, while written in a highly competent manner, in my opinion lacks the majesty of "The Complete Plain Words" (the original version of which is now somewhat dated, but which has been revised several times).