User:Fixer1234/Bryan Garner

Bryan A. Garner is a lawyer, lexicographer, and teacher who has written several books about English usage and style. He is the editor of Garner's Modern American Usage and Black's Law Dictionary, among other titles.

Background
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Garner's Modern American Usage
Garner first edited A Dictionary of Modern American Usage in 1998. The Second Edition, titled Garner's Modern American Usage, was released in 2003.

Both editions have been well recived by profession writers, lingustics, and lexicographers. In the April 2001 issue of Harper's, the novelist David Foster Wallace had this to say: "The fact of the matter is that Garner's dictionary is extremely good...Its format...includes entries on individual words and phrases and expostulative small-cap MINI-ESSAYS."

Other reviewers were slightly more reserved in thier praise. Michael Quinion of WorldWideWords.org notes that usage guides generally “row a course against the current of modern lexicography and linguistics.” These descriptive fields, he says, “often don’t meet the day-to-day needs of those users of English who want to speak and write in a way that is acceptable to educated opinion.”  Usage guides fill the gap by saying which uses are acceptable and which are not. Quinion opines that Garner does this without falling victum to “worn-out shibboleths or language superstitions.”

Simularly, Geoffrey Pullum of Language Log--the distinctly descriptive-leaning editor of the The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language--writes that Garner's approach is “very reasonably balanced between prescriptive and descriptive approaches.” Pullum, however, is critical of the book's failure to reflect “the progress that has been made toward correcting”mistakes in the analysis of English syntax made by 18th and 19th century linguists.

Books on Law Usage and Style
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