I Used to Know That: English
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Review of the bestselling "I Used To Know That": 'a jolly useful old school primer dressed up in postmodern clothes... Everyone will want to dip into this' --Tribune, 6 June 08
A fun and witty collection of snippets of information we 'used to know' from school.' --Essentials, July 2008
This is a fascinating book... it will no doubt be a great source of entertainment around many a dinner table during the festive season' --She, December 08"
A fun and witty collection of snippets of information we 'used to know' from school.' --Essentials, July 2008
This is a fascinating book... it will no doubt be a great source of entertainment around many a dinner table during the festive season' --She, December 08"
Product Description
Relearn the essential rules of the English language, from grammar and punctuation to sentence construction. Also includes parts of speech and how to improve your spelling and vocabulary. "I Used To Know That: English" is an accessible yet fun way to revisit the English language while enjoying a walk down memory lane - and remembering the stuff you really shouldn't have forgotten...
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
As a barrister words and language are the tools of my trade; as a traveller I have tried to master several languages. So I judge this excellent book as a student or a consumer not as a teacher. How I wish that my many language teachers had tools as efficient and enjoyable as Patrick Scrivenor's book at their disposal. How I wish that they had a fraction of the ability with language and skill at teaching it as Scrivenor shows here in this book. It is easy to read and understand, full of wise lessons for anyone who wants to use English well, and it is immensely entertaining. It should be required reading for any student or speaker of English and, in particular, for any teacher of the language. Had English been this clear and this much fun at school I would have remembered.
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book was written - better: cut-and-pasted with a few changes here and there to cover the tracks - with no other purpose than to line Ms Taggart's and Mr Scrivenor's pockets. (Somehow I have the nagging feeling that Patrick Scrivenor is just Ms Taggart hiding behind a pseudonym; or is that just my irk at being conned out of my lolly?). Had Ms Taggart added a few pages to "My Grammar and I" this book would have been of a complete superfluity. But to be asked to fork out 10 quid for more of the same is not 'nice'.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The more some variety of Standard English becomes an international lingua franca, the more important it is to arrest what is often seen as its 'decay'. Best-selling books such as Lynne Truss's 'zero tolerance' approach to punctuation, 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves', have tried to establish the idea that correct usage of punctuation is not a matter of pedantry but often determines the entire meaning of what is being said. Now Patrick Scrivenor has done the same thing for English grammar and usage as a whole, and in a way that makes me quite bitter that I was never taught so clearly and enjoyably at school. His book contains six main sections dealing in turn with Parts of Speech, Grammar, Spelling and Pronunciation, Punctuation, Clear Usage and Pitfalls/Confusions. All of these are admirably clear and succinct, illustrated briefly and entertainingly with a variety of quotations from sources as diverse as Mark Twain, Bill Bryson, Nigel Molesworth and P.G. Wodehouse. The opening of the section on Pronunciation gives the flavour: 'If you have struggled with Latin declensions, French genders or German irregular verbs, now is the moment of your revenge. The spelling and pronunciation of English words are without any vestige of method or even common sense. English contains more words spelt in the same way but spoken differently than any other language.'
English as a medium of communication is now also subject to severe pressure from the technology in which it is expressed. Many blogs on the internet are so misspelt and illiterate that it is often completely impossible to extract any meaning from them at all. Even the BBC News website contains frequent howlers and misspellings, presumably because as an economy measure they have done away with the old-fashioned human proof reader and rely solely on a computerised spell-checker. This frequently gets homophones wrong (a racing driver was recently assigned a 'poll position', making it impossible to determine whether this referred to his popularity or his position at the start of a Grand Prix). Patrick Scrivenor's section of Pitfalls and Confusions deals very clearly with such matters, as well as with the way in which words like 'enormity' are increasingly misused. Many of the examples are of commonly misused words that sound the same (like 'discreet' and 'discrete') but which have completely different meanings. To anyone who thinks such things don't matter in today's relaxed and abbreviated world of texting and cyberspace Scrivenor has a stern and excellent riposte: 'It is not pedantry to point out manifest nonsense.' He goes on: 'Each loss of precision diminishes the language's ability to make fine distinctions of meaning. It is a rearguard action, but one well worth fighting.' His book provides ample ammunition and will surely prove invaluable to anyone who cares about language, particularly to those who teach it. There is nothing else quite as deft and readable on the market.
English as a medium of communication is now also subject to severe pressure from the technology in which it is expressed. Many blogs on the internet are so misspelt and illiterate that it is often completely impossible to extract any meaning from them at all. Even the BBC News website contains frequent howlers and misspellings, presumably because as an economy measure they have done away with the old-fashioned human proof reader and rely solely on a computerised spell-checker. This frequently gets homophones wrong (a racing driver was recently assigned a 'poll position', making it impossible to determine whether this referred to his popularity or his position at the start of a Grand Prix). Patrick Scrivenor's section of Pitfalls and Confusions deals very clearly with such matters, as well as with the way in which words like 'enormity' are increasingly misused. Many of the examples are of commonly misused words that sound the same (like 'discreet' and 'discrete') but which have completely different meanings. To anyone who thinks such things don't matter in today's relaxed and abbreviated world of texting and cyberspace Scrivenor has a stern and excellent riposte: 'It is not pedantry to point out manifest nonsense.' He goes on: 'Each loss of precision diminishes the language's ability to make fine distinctions of meaning. It is a rearguard action, but one well worth fighting.' His book provides ample ammunition and will surely prove invaluable to anyone who cares about language, particularly to those who teach it. There is nothing else quite as deft and readable on the market.
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