American English Official Grammar Reference Book

[Deborah Hoffman]

It is an interesting cultural difference that in the U.S. "official" bodies in terms of language are private institutions whose standards have become accepted as a matter of consensus, such as the Harvard Blue Book for legal usage. The Columbia and some of the others discussed, now that I think of it, really purport to speak more to style and usage, rather than to grammar as the original asker specified, though the line between those concepts is not entirely going to be a bright one. Probably the first thing that should have been asked, though I myself didn't think of it, was who would be using the guide and for what purpose--i.e., translating a document into one's second language to aid in constructing a turn of phrase, double-checking the use of own's own native language which can become a little garbled from living in a second-language environment, or simply to have a single agreed-upon reference to settle a dispute that may be largely academic--in order to determine the
 most appropriate resource.
   
   
  >Date:         Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:13:46 +0100
>Reply-To:     "SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list"
>              <[log in to unmask]>
>Sender:       Slavic and Eastern European Languages <[log in to unmask]>
>From:         John Dunn <[log in to unmask]>
>
>Going back to Paul Gallagher's question about the bartleby.com site, I looked at some >entries, and while I found it mildly prescriptive (in that it did give some fairly tentative >recommendations), it was not particularly authoritative and certainly not official

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