By Sanjeev Verma

A few years ago I put together a style guide gleaned from all that I have learnt and read in a long and abiding affair with English language. Quite a voluminous guide it turned out to be too and, while I didn't particularly want to inflict that guide on you, I thought this sneak preview to what the guide contains might get some of you hooked. I can scarcely pass a bookstore without searching for the latest style guide. Reading them is one of life's great pleasures.

But rather than wax eloquent on style guides, let me just put down the introduction I wrote to my style guide:

Some rules really aren’t meant to be broken. We make all manner of transgressions without even realising we are doing so. Truth be told, these are the simplest transgressions we heard about in class eight or even earlier and yet these are the ones we are most liable to committing. Simple lapses are legion and I believe we should make an effort to eschew these lapses.

Here are some examples of the transgressions I am talking about:

• When a word with a clear meaning in a specialised language like science, math or music crosses over into the general language, its meaning can get twisted This infuriates the specialists who see it as linguistic corruption and also highway robbery from their vocabulary. Physicists can’t explain why quantum jump which means “a sudden alteration in atom’s energy” and is therefore exceedingly small, has leapt into general public usage to mean “huge change”.
• Psychiatrists get hysterical when schizophrenia, a psychosis often characterised by withdrawal and hallucinations, is bandied about by a public that thinks it means “split personality” and schizoid to describe any duality.
• Neuroscientists wince when congenital, which to them means “inborn; existing at birth”, is stretched by vituperative columnists to a more general “habitual, chronic”.
• Mathematicians cannot calculate why their parameter, (a variable constant used to determine other variables”, is confused by the public with the quite different perimeter and has now adopted the second word’s meaning of “limits” or “characteristics”.
• Musicians note the way crescendo, which to them means “a gradual increase in volume” has been seized by non-musicians to mean “climax”—not the reaching but the reached.
• English has probably the richest vocabulary of all languages, and the most diverse shading of meanings, of any language. There’s a distinction between house and home, continual and continuous, sensual and sensuous, forceful and forcible, childish and childlike.
• Is there a way to maintain order in a factory where hundreds of intelligent, energetic and quite independent scribblers, schooled hither and thither, at this time and that, are racing against deadlines? Is there a way to get the erudite and the benighted alike to spell aesthetic the same way? To distinguish between that and which or lie and lay or who and whom? There is, and it’s called a style guide.

Bad writing is rarely a matter of broken rules—editors can clean these up with a few pencil marks. It is more often the result of muddled thought. Bad writers consider long words more impressive than short ones, and use words like usage instead of use or methodologies instead of methods without knowing what they mean. They qualify everything with “It has been noted after careful consideration…” and the facts gets buried under loads of useless words. They string together stock phrases without regard for meaning. They also use cliches—usually inappropriately.