Books on Rhetoric & Prose That You Worship
 

What books on usage, rhetoric & prose do you worship & rely on as guiding lights?

Here are mine:

"Modern English Usage," H.W. Fowler, Ernest Gowers revision (1965). Later revisions (by M. Nicholson & Robert Burchfield) are unfortunate products of revisionist thinking & planning. Avoid them.

"The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage & Style," Bryan Garner (2001). Garner is this country's leading usage light. He has solved the problem of balancing tradition & contemporaneity; he recognizes that language changes, but changes for bad a lot more often than for good.

"Modern American Usage," Wilson Follett (1965). The cornerstone of good American English in the modern era. Lovingly finished & edited by Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling & others after Follett's premature death.

"The Complete Plain Words," Sir Ernest Gowers, revised by Sidney Greenbaum & Janet Whitcut (1986). Combines "Plain Words" (1948) & "The ABC of Plain Words" (1951), two masterpieces of prose style by a British civil servant & master annotater of Fowler.

"Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers," Jacques Barzun (1975).

"On Writing, Editing, & Publishing: Essays Explicative & Hortatory," Jacques Barzun (1986). Barzun is the nonpareil of English usage style & standards of the latter 20th century. His sensible insights & lapidary prose are abundant in all his four or five dozen books, from 1937 to the present.

"Usage & Abusage," Eric Partridge (1955). Partridge is the greatest lexicographer of slang in the west. He successfully abridged this book in 1969.

"The Reader Over Your Shoulder," Robert Graves & Alan Hodge (1961). The greatest English-language love poet of the 20th century & his colleague wrote this handbook for writers of prose, & supplied dozens of "negative examples" for examination, their plan a sort of explication de texte for sense & clarity.

I think you posted this awhile back, didn't you?

Despite the fact that I am pursuing a PhD in literature (admittedly it is 17th century), I am only familiar with the first three of the books you listed. I have no "guiding light" that I study religiously, that's for sure.

I was forced to read several articles on various theories of rhetoric and didn't get much out of them. These, however, focused on utilizing the theory in the classroom which is perhaps why they were disappointing. The theories they expounded upon often have very few practical applications when it comes down to creating a lesson plan. I did enjoy Paul C. Rodger's "A Discourse-Centered Rhetoric of the Paragraph" because it put aside some of the pretension that is seemingly inherent in articles about theory in order to deal with everyday writing.

I can discuss popular prose and rhetoric styles of the seventeenth century much more intelligently. They were very anal about such things back then. lol

I don't know! I hope not! How embarrassing. Was it the same list?

The Little, Brown Handbook.

Dick and Jane
three blind mice
the Jabborwock

Nancy, I get my authors all mixed up...who is known for writing during your era? chaucer? Shakespeare? I admit ignorance.......for once.........
could you give me some idea of what was written during your era so I have an idea of your area of expertise?.....

16th century, Chaucer was even earlier.
I'm guessing Nancy has studied John Donne, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and some other people whose name I cannot remember now. :lol:

Chris is right, except she left off Milton and a few folks who I don't expect anyone not in lit to care about. lol

I am excited about some women authors who haven't been getting as much treatment. Tentatively, my dissertation is going to be about Anna Weamys and Lady Mary Wroth, and how they took the masculine genre of the epic and made it into a tool to express their own ideas about the political occurences of the time. And some other boring stuff about the gender relationships in their works, and how they presented political commentary through gender representations, blahblahblah. ;)

Sidney is not 17th century. However, his Arcadia is instrumental to my thesis because both women wrote "spin-offs" of the Arcadia, using that as the entryway into the epic genre.

Well, sometimes the 17th century folks like to claim him because he was only a few years behind. These century markers are largely arbitrary anyway. Who says the world of 1601 is so massively different than the world of 1599?

Centuries...
 

That's right. :)