The biggest issue I have with English or any language I've learnt (or tried learning) has been grammar. I've tried reading On the Elements of Style, and while it did help, I feel like there's still things I have to delve deeper on. I've thought about reading Borges: On Writing and Le Guin's Steering the Craft, but at the end of the day, I thought there's something else to language and prose that I'm not familiar with. Something these books can't really provide; what resources do you recommend that helps guide someone through writing prose and proper grammar?
I hesitate to recommend a grammar book to you - there's only so many of them to go around, and millions of people need one more than you do I liked in particular "I feel like there's still things" which is a phrase that (rightly) puts idiom above grammar. Unless you like reading about grammar for its own sake, I'd suggest to get a short, solid reference guide. Maybe 'The Oxford Guide to English Usage' (1993). You'll know everything in it, but if you need to double-check something it's quick to find the relevant bit without wading through lots of pages. When first learning a language, or using an unfamiliar one (and I say this for completeness, it doesn't seem relevant to the OP), I find it's good to have more than one grammar as often one explains something in a way that makes more sense to how my brain thinks. And then for style, after you've read one or two books on it (and the ones you've read are well-known) the amount of new tips you pick up from each additional book drops off very quickly. And you might want genre-specific ones. On the one hand they go out of fashion very quickly, on the other people read them once and pass them on, so they're easy and cheap to find in second-hand shops, and even very old ones sometimes have a good way of putting something - so personally I just flick through them in the shop and put them back There is a Humble Bundle at the moment for how-to-write books: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/ultimate-writing-bundle-adams-media-books?hmb_source=&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_1_layout_type_threes_tile_index_2_c_ultimatewritingbundleadamsmedia_bookbundle They did another one of these a couple of years ago and I'd suggest there might be reasons these ones are in the bundles but if there is something there that catches your eye, they're cheap - and there's something to be said for the format of downloading books you'll probably only need to look at once rather than them taking up space on a shelf.
Thank you for the response! I live in a third-world country where such books are sadly not readily available (shipping is hell on it's own), so I resort to purchasing e-books. I should probably then look for more resources on English grammar in order to get a wider scope on grammar, surprisingly it never crossed my mind to check out the Oxford guide. I'll apply this when I learn other languages, as I'm also trying to study Chinese.
Ah, books are a pain for postage - equivalent to lumps of wood. How about archive.org? https://archive.org/search.php?query=English%20Grammar There seem to be reasonably recent ones there, and even the copyright-expired ones from 1900-1950 will be okay. There might be chapters on things like locatives or gerunds that are obscure, or falling into disuse, or that they don't spend time teaching anymore, and certain things used to be much tighter - but there won't be anything that's become incorrect.
I'm not sure there is a royal road to style, but reading the works of the great stylists, like E. B. White or John McPhee in nonfiction will help you, particularly if you pay attention to how they're making their statements. What they all have in common is that they make it look easy, like a great athlete makes a move look easy. As an exercise, try re-writing their words and try to convey as much of the information in as few words as you can. It's tough to do! As for fiction and poetry, I'm not much of a guide, since those aren't my genres, and author's styles are very idiosyncratic depending on the genre they represent. But a good place to start is the early work of Kurt Vonnegut (my favorites are Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater). Again, he makes it look easy, but the text's clarity disguises the pains he took to achieve that clarity. And all of Mark Twain's work is out of copyright. He was an original master of style in American literature.
All three of these titles are links to the Amazon Kindle version. Hodges Harbrace Handbook The uncontested standard reference for Freshman Composition in the United States, HHH is well organized, and clear and prescriptive on the most commonly occurring points of uncertainty. Don't imagine it's mere "baby stuff" because it's used in Freshman Comp classes — every week I'm in a critique group, I see writers young and old making mistakes (and I don't mean stylistic choices) that make their writing look less professional, mistakes they wouldn't make if they'd refer to this arbiter. If you buy a less expensive earlier version, at least be sure it's post-2000. Several rules were added around then to cover pathologies that emerged in the 1990s as large numbers of teens who began writing on the Internet reached college age. Grammatically Correct: The Essential Guide to Spelling, Style, Usage, Grammar, and Punctuation. By Anne Stilman, Grammatically Correct is another excellent source, one that I'd describe as complementary to HHH rather than an alternative to it. I consider it far superior to The Elements of Style. If you could only have one, I'd be sorely torn to say whether you should choose this or HHH. They're different kinds of books. But this is prose, making it more of a read-from-front-to-back experience. HHH will ensure you understand the basics (even those that many native speakers do not), and GC will give you polish, nuance, and broader understanding. Garner's Modern English Usage. GMEU is my first go-to for advanced questions about usage. Bryan Garner is authoritative without being dogmatic. While fighting the good battle, he recognizes lost causes and calls out pedantry where he sees it. This book, while enlightening, may be well beyond what you're looking for as a speaker/writer of English as a Second Language. Garner's observations on usage are more the kind that distinguish average native speakers/writers from the best native speakers/writers of English. It's a reference work, not prose like the Stilman book—you look up a word or phrase, and Garner states his research and his opinion.
I agree with JLT that there's no royal road to style, and that the best or only way to develop a good ear for it is to read good stylists. What particularly Grammatically Correct and the Hodges Harbrace Handbook give you is an understanding of what you're seeing a good stylist do. I often see aspiring writers cobble together syntactic constructs that look like something they've seen a more sophisticated writer do, but which don't actually work. The most common example (and certainly so in journalism) may be the dangling modifier, but it's only one of many faux pas that come from emulating the surface without understanding the deeper workings and the rules that govern them.
I still have to get into Vonnegut's works more... Adding that to the reading list, I've honestly never tried that exercise rewriting other author's words. But I did see one of the articles on the forum where you color code parts of an essay/book you're reading. I think it'll probably be helpful for me as well. All the suggestions here have been wonderful information and resources, thank you!
