Practical English Usage 4th edition (OUP 2016), reviewed by the author

Michael Swan, UK

Michael Swan writes English Language teaching and reference materials. His recent publications include the Oxford English Grammar Course (OUP 2011,with Catherine Walter) and Thinking about Language Teaching, Selected Articles 1982–2011 (OUP 2012). He has had extensive teaching experience with adult learners, and has worked with teachers in many countries. His academic interests include descriptive and pedagogic grammar, instructed and naturalistic SLA, cross-language influence in acquisition, and the relationship between applied linguistic theory and classroom language-teaching practice. He is also a published poet. E-mail: swanmic@gmail.com, website: mikeswan.net

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Introduction
How PEU came to be written
What’s in the book?
Was a new edition really necessary?
Reorganisation
The international edition
Now online
Workbooks
Support
Correctness and errors
Conclusion

Introduction

It is an unusual pleasure to be asked to review one’s own work. ‘How shall I begin?’ I ask myself. How about ‘Never has the fundamental beauty of the relative clause been so elegantly delineated’? Or ‘This fast-moving account of contrastive stress will set the readers’ pulses racing.’ Or ‘Suffixes: revealed at last in this brilliant work, the astonishing truth!’

Well, perhaps not. Better to start with the basic facts. Practical English Usage (PEU) is a guide for teachers and advanced learners of English as a foreign or second language, who want reliable and digestible information about standard English. It provides explanations and examples of usage in a large number of areas where learners typically have difficulty. (‘Usage’ is a conveniently vague word, commonly used to talk about problematic points in language whatever their exact nature.) It is not aimed at native speakers of English, whose concerns are largely different from those of foreign learners. The book has quite a long history, starting well before its first publication in 1980.

How PEU came to be written

I started in ELT as an untrained teacher, knowing virtually nothing about English except how to speak and write it. Course books and grammar practice materials provided some of the basic information that my students and I needed, and this helped up to a point. However, when I tried to correct homework, the books often didn't explain why something was wrong; and the students had an irritating habit of asking questions in class which I couldn't answer. Working out the rules on the spot was generally useless. When I was asked about the difference between one word or structure and another, I would either produce meaningless phrases like 'It's a matter of style / a question of emphasis', or invent explanations that turned out on reflection to be untrue. In fact, as I slowly came to realise, it's no use trying to analyse language on your feet: your first answer is always wrong. So as I developed a professional conscience, I took to admitting when I didn't know the answer ('Even your teacher doesn't know everything'), promising to find out, and hoping that they would forget.

The trouble was that the right kind of book didn't exist. Learners' grammars and dictionaries often had nothing to say about the kind of detailed point that lay behind a student's problem, or they simply addressed it briefly in a footnote, or gave it a line inside a larger entry. There were one or two books around with titles like 'Common Errors in English' or 'A Student's Handbook of Language Problems', but these were not very comprehensive, not always clear, and often inaccurate. Better explanations could frequently be found buried in a larger reference work, but you had to dig for it.

So I started digging. I made notes of my students' recurrent questions, and spent a good deal of my spare time in libraries, looking through the appropriate reference books and building up a set of clear simple answers. As time went on, I wrote these answers on index cards and put them in the staffroom of the school where I taught, with an invitation to other teachers to contribute their own knowledge, insights and further questions. My aim was above all to produce something different from a standard language manual: not page after page covering the whole of a topic, but, as far as practicable, single separate answers to single separate questions. Intermediate and advanced students don't generally want to know how gerunds, prepositions or past tenses are used; they want to know why this gerund, this preposition or this past tense can or can't be used in this situation; and their teachers need to know what to tell them.

Time went by, and after 15 years or so in classrooms I moved into full-time writing. How easy it would be, I thought, to turn my card index into a proper book. Of course, it was not easy at all. But a couple of years later, I did produce a rather messy badly-typed draft, to which, fortunately, Oxford University Press reacted positively, and after some more work PEU was published in 1980. It was, I believe, the first reasonably comprehensive and properly-researched guide to common problems in English as a foreign language. It attracted a lot of attention, received very positive reactions, and came to be widely used. Time went by again, however, and in the 1990s a second edition was clearly needed, taking into account recent changes in English, feedback from users, advice from British and American academic linguists, and my own continuing research. This edition weighed about 50% more than the first, reflecting my growing discovery that there was, so to speak, more grammar around than I had first thought. And then some more time went by, more changes happened in English, accessible corpus evidence for usage continued to build up, and I managed to sort out a few points that I had earlier found difficult to deal with simply and clearly, or just got wrong. All of this justified a third edition, which appeared in 2005.

What’s in the book?

English learners and their teachers need information on a wide range of problems in very different areas: sentence grammar, differences between speech and writing, word meaning and use, punctuation and spelling, the formulaic language of common situations, the grammatical and lexical devices that structure texts and conversations, and many other things. PEU aims, in its 600-odd entries, to provide clear reliable explanations for as many such problems as possible. In some cases, an explanation may be somewhat different to that found elsewhere: the rules typically given for certain points (e.g. conditionals or indirect speech) are not always accurate or helpful. Of course, any usage guide can deal only with the more frequent questions that arise, particularly as far as vocabulary is concerned – if the book included all the word problems that students are likely to encounter, it would weigh 20-plus kilos, would cost a fortune, and would have to be published with wheels on.

PEU has always followed my key principle of providing mostly single answers to single questions, or to small groups of related questions – English in bite-sized chunks, so to speak. However, I have also felt it useful to include a few entries on more general topics – for instance levels of formality, slang, the status of standard language and dialects, and attitudes to correctness.

The variety of English described is standard British English, spoken and written, but PEU includes a great deal of information about British-American differences. Explanations are, as far as possible, in simple everyday language. Where it has been necessary to use grammatical terminology, I have generally preferred to use traditional terms that are simple and easy to understand, except where this would be seriously misleading. One or two of these terms (e.g. ‘future tense’) would be regarded as unsatisfactory by some academic grammarians, but those are not the people I am writing for. For readers who need it, the book includes a comprehensive glossary of the terminology used. Examples illustrate typical present-day spoken and written usage. They are not taken directly from corpora – in my view this is not generally a successful approach – but both explanations and examples are carefully checked against corpus data.

Was a new edition really necessary?

Consumers are rightly suspicious of updated versions of existing products: these all too often turn out to be the same old thing in a shiny new package. However, having spent the best part of two years working hard on the fourth edition, I would not trust myself to react calmly to someone who asked ‘Isn’t this simply the third edition in a redesigned cover?’ No, it ***** isn’t! Yet again time had moved on (where does it all go?) and all of a sudden the third edition was ten years old, it was showing its age, and the case for a further revision had become pressing. I sometimes meet people who still use my first edition and tell me that they are happy with it. Well, I’m happy that they are happy, but one wouldn’t want to find one’s way round London with a street map published in 1980, and much the same goes for finding one’s way round English. While languages don’t reshape themselves as fast as cities, English continues to develop and change, research continues to give us useful new information, and a usage guide needs to keep pace.

The decision to prepare a new edition gave me the chance to add a few new items that I felt would be useful – for instance an entry on academic English, and information on racist, sexist and other kinds of discriminatory language. I have also included brief notes on some other varieties of English besides British and American (Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, South African, Indian, Caribbean and Singapore/Malaysian), along with a word on that widely-discussed non-variety, English as a lingua franca. I was also pleased to be able to slip in some minor clarifications and corrections, where I wasn’t completely happy with what was in the last edition. (Nobody ever gets everything right the first time, or the second, or the third!)

Reorganisation

After consultation with users of the previous editions, I decided it was time to make an important change in the book’s organisation. In the first three editions, the entries were arranged in alphabetical order of title. This dictionary-like formula works well in native-speaker usage guides, which deal mostly with word problems. For several reasons it is less helpful in a guide dealing with foreign learners’ questions, more of which are about points of grammar. Because of this, in practice people tend to ignore the A–Z listing of main titles, locating the information they need by going to the very complete index at the back. In the fourth edition the entries are still separate, dealing as always mainly with single problems or small groups of problems. However, they are now grouped by topic, not by alphabetical order of title. All the grammatical entries, and some others that fit more or less under the grammatical umbrella, have been brought together into 28 main Sections. Together, these constitute a systematically organised students’ grammar for those who need such a resource. The last third of the book deals with vocabulary-related questions, and includes an A–Z list of nearly 300 word problems. As before, there is a very complete index.

The international edition

PEU contains a detailed and systematic entry on taboo language and swearwords. Such information is often left out of teaching and reference material, but many people quite reasonably want to know about these aspects of language. The appearance of this element in the first edition caused a few raised eyebrows and one or two cries of distress. In general, however, it was welcomed: there have been very few complaints, and I have had plenty of favourable comments from people who find the material useful or interesting. None the less, the inclusion of taboo words and expressions in a book written for worldwide use is not a straightforward matter. There are cultures where language of this kind is considered totally unacceptable, and books containing it cannot be used in educational contexts. In order to respect such cultural sensibilities, an ‘International Students’ Edition’ is available which omits the potentially offensive material.

Now online

PEU4 is also available in a version which incorporates a licence to access an online adaptation of the book. This is a very fine piece of work indeed, beautifully designed and with excellent functionality – I feel perfectly comfortable about saying this because I can take no credit whatever for the vast amount of thought, work and expertise involved. (When I went to meetings about the online version I generally couldn’t understand what anybody was saying.) Bundled with the online version there is a new edition of the three-level Diagnostic Tests, which help learners and their teachers to see where their gaps are, and which parts of PEU need to be studied in consequence. These too are impressively designed and a pleasure to navigate: I believe they will be found very useful.

Workbooks

There are no workbooks as such for PEU. However, the three levels of the Oxford English Grammar Course (Swan and Walter 2011) contain consolidation and practice material for all of the important grammatical points dealt with in the book. These incorporate and extend our two earlier grammar practice books, The Good Grammar Book and How English Works, which performed a similar function. The cartoons are all still there!

Support

Like its predecessors, this edition owes a great deal to feedback from users of earlier versions. It has also benefited greatly from the generous advice of three distinguished academic linguists. Professor Bas Aarts of University College, London, Professor Loretta Gray of Central Washington University, and Dr Catherine Walter of Oxford University read the whole of the material, made numerous valuable suggestions, and prevented me from making one or two embarrassing slips. If there are any remaining mistakes (and I am admitting nothing), it is not their fault. And the book would not be what it is without the remarkable expertise and dedication of the OUP editorial, design and on-line production team: once again, it has been a privilege and pleasure to work with top-class professionals.

Correctness and errors

One cannot show what happens in a language without also referring to what does not, and PEU necessarily has comprehensive lists of things that can go wrong with learners’ English. This has sometimes been misinterpreted. Not long ago I was told off by a friend who is a distinguished expert on the use of English as a lingua franca, on the grounds that my book, with its ‘don’t say this’ lists, was effectively telling all the world’s English learners that they should try to conform to native-speaker norms of correctness. That is not at all what I think. PEU is a reference book for those who want the information in it – nothing more. It is written for people who wish to know what is correct, and what is not, in one kind of English, and has relatively little to say those who have other priorities, and who have no interest in achieving a high level of accuracy. I am, so to speak, a cartographer: I make maps of standard British English, and I try to make them as reliable and useful as possible for people who wish to travel in the territory I describe. But I don’t tell people that they have to go to the places on my maps, or that they have to choose the routes that I highlight – that is entirely their business.

Conclusion

I hope this review has helped to explain why I wrote PEU, and what has gone into the new edition. But it hasn't addressed the crucial question for any reviewer – is the book any good? Well, I think it's terrific ('this brilliant work …'), but that doesn't mean much; most parents are convinced their children are beautiful. At any rate, I have done my very best to produce the book that didn’t exist when I needed it, and large numbers of teachers and advanced students have told me that it has helped them when they in turn needed guidance. I am delighted that so many people have found PEU useful – it makes me feel that all that work was worthwhile – and I hope that this new edition will help many more.

Please check the English Update for Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the English Language course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.