About the Book

A book that may be read simply for pleasure or as part of a rigorous self-review, English Plain and Simple seeks to help nonnative English speakers improve their written English without having to go back to the classroom. Each of its chapters is a delightful, entertaining essay built around an important lesson or insight into the language. Readers will have a truly enjoyable learning experience reading this book, for they can go straight to any chapter that strikes their fancy and need not worry about missing any prerequisite instruction.

English Plain and Simple first trains its guns on what the author considers the most vicious enemies of written English communication: corporatese, bureaucratese, academese, researchese, and other forms of gobbledygook. Next, it gently walks the reader though the basic and finer aspects of English grammar and semantics, revisiting all of the parts of speech and grammar structures—from nouns and pronouns to adjectives and adverbs, and from the comma and period all the way to paragraphing. Then it takes up two of the most formidable aspects of language: the figures of speech and rhetoric. All told, the book touches on practically all of the language skills that one needs to write English confidently, clearly, and convincingly.

For this book, Jose A. Carillo won the National Book Award for Linguistics from the Manila Critics Circle in 2005.

A charmer of a book
that delights as well
as it instructs!