Enjoy your English

Ohhh, that sounded like school days english classes! Actually, it's the name of a book I am reading by Nick Renton (2004), a bloke who has written sixty books prior to this one and it shows. He opens with a few pages of quotations about english. For example:

England and America are two countries separated by a common language. (H Mencken)
Where does that leave Australia in 2009, one must ask?

A baby born during the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages had more chance of celebrating its first birthday than a new Australian novel published today. (Dawn Cohen)
Oh dear.

If you stare at any sentence long enough, it will look wrong. (S Sturgis)

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do, but has escaped the terrible desire to write. (E White)

(..on plain english) Don't let a shortcut for the writer become a roadblock for the reader.
and,
Eschew obfuscation.

I love deadlines - they make the loveliest whooshing sound as they go by. (Douglas Adams)

If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad. (J Benbow)

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.
Believe it or not, this was written by Marcus Tullius Cicero who lived from 106 - 43 BC.

The author uses the following example for the poor use of english words so nobody can really understand the writer. Can you understand it?

Multiloquence characterised by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability and other familiar manifectations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilised for promulgations implementing procrusteam determinations by governmental bodies.

A good read

Anna Jacobs, Our Lizzie
Jodi Picoult, Keeping Faith
Steven Carroll, The Time We Have Taken
Chen Da, Sounds of the River
Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News
Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart
Christopher Bryson, The Fluoride Deception
The Australian Society of Authors, Australian Book Contracts, Rhonda Whitton and Sheila Hollingworth
Mission Impossible – How to make money from your writing
Tim Winton, Breath
Cathy Glass, Hidden
Kim Wilkins, Angel of Ruin