Book info

• Title Troublesome Words
• Author Bill Bryson
• Year 1984
• Genre Non-fiction

With Troublesome Words, journalist and bestselling travel-writer Bill Bryson gives us a clear, concise and entertaining guide to the problems of English usage and spelling that has been an indispensable companion to those who work with the written word for over twenty years. So if you want to discover whether you should care about split infinitives, are cursed with an uncontrollable outbreak of commas or were wondering if that newsreader was right to say 'an historic day', this superb book is the place to find out.

Thoughts

Bill Bryson is always learning and when he’s not travelling around the world, or compiling a book about the history of the world and all the science that goes along with it, he’s correcting all us writers on our grammar.

Just Bill, 26 letters of the alphabet, a bookful of words and several grammatical theories. It’s written as a dictionary but each section has varying amount of information along with it, from how to spell particularly tricky words to a whole interesting concept behind grammar.

I read it as a book but it will also sit on my shelf alongside the dictionaries as a reference work.

Rating: 4 / 5