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Grammar is a vital tool for any executive

May 2, 2013 | The Financial Time | by Michael Skapinker.

A reader recently sent me this plea: "I want to write clearly, concisely and correctly. Canyouhelpme?"

There are many guides to writing. One of the most popular, deservedly, is George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language", in which he identified a principal sin of writers then and now: "Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."

We can all recognise what he was talking about. We see it, especially, in business memos : chunks of jargon linked together in the hope that the writer will get a thought across, if there was any thought to start with.

When another reader, a chief executive, asked me what I thought of a speech he had composed and planned to deliver to his staff, I sent him Orwell's six rules for better writing, which appeared in the essay.

The rules are: avoid figures of speech you are used to seeing in print; use short rather than long words; cut out any words you can; favour the active over the passive; use everyday English rather than jargon, foreign or scientific words - and "break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous".

Orwell's rules have served writers for decades, but there is a problem: many, including those in positions of power, no longer know what the active and passive voice are.

They are victims of a damaging educational fashion: the refusal, throughout much of the English-speaking world, to teach children grammar. It has changed a little, in the UK at least, but, in my experience of schools, children's knowledge is still not very deep.

I am old enough to have caught the end of grammar teaching and to have learnt, at least, what verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives are. I also studied Latin. I remember little of it, but it gave me the rudiments of grammatical structure.

I was then fortunate, in the early 1980s, to do a four-week introductory course at London's International House for those who wanted to teach English as a foreign language. This was the most stimulating and useful bit of education I ever had. We learnt how to run a class and, at the same time, did an intensive study of the functions of tenses, such as the present perfect continuous ("I have been catching up with the grammar I never learnt at school") and phrasal verbs, such as "catch up", "catch on" and "catch out".

Grammar is important not because it teaches you what is correct. That changes over time and place, although it is useful to know what self-appointed language guardians regard as correct.

Grammar matters because it shows how the language is put together. Some people have the flair to write well without explicit knowledge of grammatical principles, but no one who studies them regrets it.

If you know what an infinitive is, you can make a decision about whether to split one, and if you know what the possessive and gerund are you can consider whether "I object to you having written to me in this way" has supplanted "I object to your having written".

When you understand how language works, you can observe the way others use it, whether in fiction, journalism or company announcements.

What, Orwell apart, are the best guides to grammar and writing style? I know that many of you, particularly in the US, are shouting "Strunk and White"! The Elements of Style is short, precise and loved by millions. Reading it will do you good, but I find the book - heresy, I know - over-prescriptive and unengaging.

Lynne Truss's bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves is very engaging, but is restricted to punctuation and apostrophes. These are vital: many executives' punctuation lets them down. They are particularly weak on full stops and semi-colons, linking together what should be discrete sentences with commas. ("It has been a challenging year, trading in our main markets remains depressed.") But Truss's book doesn't contain the full grammar education many are seeking.

The most useful guide I have found is The Penguin Writer's Manual by Martin Manser and Stephen Curtis. (Yes, Penguin is a sister company of the Financial Times but recommending this book will not make me a penny richer.)

Readers will, no doubt, let me know their favourites - and set me right on my own grammar and writing style. That is fine. We all have plenty to learn.

michael.skapinker@ft.com

By Michael Skapinker