Essential English: For Journalists, Editors and Writers (Pimlico) (Paperback)

Harold Evans, editor of The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981 and then of The Times for a year, first wrote his Newsman's English and News Headlines in the 1970s. In an age of increasingly sloppy English, Evans's books acquired the status of classics with their condemnation of dangling participles and gratuitous adjective and adverbs. Now they've been edited, updated and merged into a single new volume by Crawford Gillan. The emphasis, which hasn't dated at all, is still on the need for plain muscular English which says what it has to say in as few well-chosen words as possible.

The book has at least three uses. First, it could be a text book for trainee journalists, especially given the large number of published verbose examples Evans quotes and then rewrites as demonstration pieces. Second, it has plenty of advice for experienced journalists and editors trying to write better. Third, it is full of useful advice for anyone--beyond the media--who wants to write more coherently.

Essential English certainly raises awareness. You probably won't read it without feeling obliged to double back and delete your redundancies the next time you write something. In the common expression "depreciate in value" the last two words, for instance, can go without loss of meaning. You don't need "gainful" in front of "employment" either and Evans lists dozens of other examples. And be brutal with tired expressions such as "wealth of information" or "pillar of the church", he advises. He also provides an intriguing thesaurus for headline writers in search of pithiness. For "harmonisation," try "accord", "bargain", "compact", "pact", "peace", or "truce", he says. --Susan Elkin

Synopsis
Essential English is a brisk and pungent guide to the use of words as tools of communication. It is written primarily for journalists, yet its lessons are of immense value to all who face the problem of giving information, whether to the general public or within business, professional or social organizations. What makes a good English sentence? How should you rewrite a bad one? What cliches and other word-traps are to be avoided? How do you shorten unnecessarily verbose source-material? How is the essence of what you have to say be conveyed, and placed in proper relation to any background information? These are questions for all. Using a wealth of examples, all drawn from newspapers in Britain and the United States, Essential English is an indispensable guide for all who have to convey information by the written or printed word.