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Prescriptivism in English literature?
A final contribution to the series from Leiden University's ‘Bridging the Unbridgeable’ project
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2016
Extract
One of the things we discovered in the course of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project is that usage guides are predominantly produced by non-specialists. There are linguists, too, who wrote usage guides – David Crystal, for instance, Pam Peters and most recently Stephen Pinker – but authors are very often journalists and novelists. Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), whose The King's English was published posthumously in 1997, is a good example, and so is Rebecca Gowers, who revised and updated her great-grandfather's Plain Words in 2014. Examples of journalists-turned-usage-guide-writers are Simon Heffer (Strictly English, 2010) and Oliver Kamm (Accidence Will Happen, 2015). Writing is their job, so it is not surprising that novelists and journalists are drawn to language prescription as well. They may not be linguists in the strict sense, but they should be considered language specialists all the same.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016
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