Language is the great gift that distinguishes human beings from other creatures. Like most gifts, it can be used thoughtfully and to good advantage—or it can be used carelessly, indifferently, and quite unsuccessfully. The way in which you use language can tell people a good deal about your personal qualities—your way of thinking, your alertness, your concern for useful communication with other people—and your concern, your respect, for the English language itself.

When your speech is sloppy, when it seems to reveal that you have never learned—or perhaps just don’t care—about using language properly, you certainly don’t do yourself any favors. Other people are likely to assume, whether fairly or not, that your thinking has flaws because your language does, and you may, as a result, fail to make the favorable impression that can so often be important. People may assume that, whatever your strong points, you will not fit in well in business or professional or social situations where the proper use of language is taken for granted. Even more seriously, they may be unable even to understand important things you’re trying to say because your language is inadequately serving its most basic purpose: to convey clearly what’s on your mind. In short, when your language doesn’t meet expected standards, you are likely to do serious injustice to your talents and your ideas.

On the bright side, a command of proper English provides a kind of invisible passport into the company of people who, because they respect language, almost automatically respect others who use it correctly. This is true in social gatherings, business conversations, everything from random exchanges to public addresses. In all these circumstances, an awareness that you are meeting common standards of correctness can breed a comfortable self-assurance; you can be quietly confident that your use of language is an asset rather than a liability.

Of course, you will probably not be regularly or strongly aware of speaking “correct English” any more than you are always conscious of conforming to other codes that govern our conduct: ordinary politeness, for example, or adherence to the rules of various games. This means that for the most part it will only be the errors, the lapses in the appropriate use of language, which you will notice in others’ speech, or they in yours. This may not be a particularly pleasant fact about human nature, but it’s a pretty good reason for embarking on the program set forth in this book.

Like our acceptance and observance of most rules in the conduct of our lives, correct use of language becomes a habit, and it is with the cultivation of this habit that the program is concerned. As we work with habits of speech (eliminating old, undesirable ones; developing new, useful ones), we’ll have to rely considerably on “rules” and discuss the “right” and “wrong” ways of saying things, so it is only fair to say before we start that the rules are not universal, timeless laws, inscribed somewhere in stone and to be applied mechanically to determine without question what is right and wrong. Language changes constantly and in many ways. Any student of language knows that words enter and depart from our common vocabulary and, while they do remain in use, they often undergo changes of meaning. Ideas of grammatical correctness also change. And a word or construction commonly accepted in one geographic area or by one particular group of people can be quite foreign to those in other locales or communities, even though all of them are speaking English. This variability is true even of the use each one of us makes of language, for our speaking and writing are frequently adjusted to the circumstances that surround them. If you are like most people, your language at a ball game is different from your language in a committee meeting; your official business letters are not written in precisely the same language as your e-mail messages or letters to your family ; and there is considerable difference in the way you address your employer and your language with a 4-year-old child (unless you are particularly rash or you have an unusually dullwitted employer).

This variability in language suggests that we shouldn’t be too rigid or stubborn about what is right and wrong, for these are matters that many circumstances can change or modify. (Professional students of language can systematically study such changes, so that a thorough knowledge of language includes much insight into the processes of change themselves.) But although language changes, and although there is no absolute, permanent definition of correctness, we can take as our guide language that experienced and careful speakers accept as correct. We can determine what is “right” and “wrong” about our use of language by learning principles that will help us recognize this established standard. To put it bluntly: While some of the rules for correct English may be impermanent and relative, don’t try this theory out on potential customers or clients or employers, who may be quite naturally put off by what they regard as your improper (or inappropriate or uneducated) use of English.

The fact is that, at any particular time, it is possible to speak of specific uses of language, not as eternally correct, but as “accepted,” as conforming to what the great New Oxford English Dictionary simply calls “the standard of literature and conversation.” The standards are those applied by the compilers of dictionaries (many of whom today go so far as to classify words under such headings as “formal,” “conversational,” “slang,” and even “vulgar”). The standards are set by various experts on language who in turn rely, at least in part, on the practices of a great many diversified but responsible speakers and writers. These experts can certainly disagree; most of them would be among the first to insist that their findings are subject to change and challenge. But what they do is to record a consensus as to the “right” choice to be made by those of us who, for good reason, seek to use language with precision, clarity, and force.