For Who the Bell Tolls

Resumen del libro

This is a book that explains the grammar that people really need to know, such as the fact that an apostrophe is the difference between a company that knows its s*** and a company that knows it's s***, or the importance of capital letters to avoid ambiguity in such sentences as "I helped my Uncle Jack off his horse." David Marsh's lifelong mission has been to create order out of chaos. For four decades, he has worked for newspapers, from the Sun to the Financial Times, from local weeklies that sold a few thousand copies to the Guardian, with its global readership of nine million, turning the sow's ear of rough-and-ready reportage into a passable imitation of a silk purse. The chaos might be sloppy syntax, a disregard for grammar or a fundamental misunderstanding of what grammar is.

It could be an adherence to "rules" that have no real basis and get in the way of fluent, unambiguous communication at the expense of ones that are actually useful. Clear, honest use of English has many enemies: politicians, business and marketing people, local authority and civil service jargonauts, rail companies, estate agents, academics...and some journalists. This is the book to help defeat them.

Biografía del autor

David Marsh (1952) Analista de economía y finanzas especializado en el contexto europeo. Estudió Química en la Universidad de Oxford, pero en 1973 se inclinó hacia el periodismo y entró a trabajar en la agencia Reuters. Entre 1978 y 1995 trabajó en el Financial Times, llegó a ser el responsable de la zona europea. Cofundador y presidente del Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), ha trabajado en el periódico financiero Handelsblatt y en diversas entidades de la City londinense, y ha escrito varios libros centrados en analizar diferentes aspectos de la economía en Europa, como El Bundesbank (1992) y The Euro: The Politics of the New Global Currency (1994).