I've been reading Lynne Truss's book, 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves', and it has inspired me to do a little holding forth of my own - although more on grammar than on punctuation.

In truth, all books about grammar and punctuation make me a little nervous. I suspect that the people who write them take the rules of English much more seriously than I do. I'm with Jacques Barzun - I think the rules of grammar are a big help in teaching children who haven't read enough to develop an ear for the language. But an adult who has developed an ear should not be cowed by the false notion that they are an immutable set of laws policed by an inquisition of severe gnomes in Zurich.

If you write a lot, sooner or later, you will find yourself in conflict with most of the rules - if you obey, what you write will sound odd. If you don't, well, you can almost hear those toplofty gnomes hissing and sniffing over their very small biers. My attitude is, to hell with 'em. Go for what sounds best and to the devil with gnomes.

But at the same time, I have to acknowledge that I do try to obey the rules most of the time, so I'm not as cavalier about them as all that. John Simon (an American writer and critic who, I can't resist mentioning, once wrote that the young Diana Rigg was "built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses") reviewed a book not so very long ago in which he explained his own principal tenet for the writing of good English:

"Language," he wrote, "is what we reach other people through, hence cultivating it is not some esoteric predilection, but a courtesy to one's fellow human beings … a social responsibility."

That I can understand. Good speech, like good writing, is a form of civility. You obey the rules, when you can, because you want to be courteous to people, to use well-put-together English in order to make it more easily understood.

How much less intimidating that is than having to memorise rules that cover what happens comma-wise, for example, when a subordinate clause both follows another subordinate clause and is to be inferred as modifying an independent clause beginning a sentence.

Trust me … you knew the answer! It's just that you probably never had to work out how to say where you'd put the comma and why.

So my purpose today, in highlighting some common mistakes in the use of English, is not so much to criticise them as "wrong", as it is to point out how unkempt they are, like tangled hair, and how much, as a result, they make communication, especially written communication, more difficult than it ought to be.

As a kind of courtesy, since she launched me on this subject, I'll start with the thing that annoyed Lynne Truss to such an extent that she wrote her book - forming the plural by adding, not just an s, but an apostrophe and an s, as in the sign she saw in a shop window - "Come Inside for CD's, Video's, DVD's and Book's". She inveighs against this "satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes".

Satanic seems a little strong - apostrophes s are simply unnecessary, since they have no job of work to do … CDs and CD's are the same no matter which way you cut it. To the eye, the apostrophes make the sign cluttered and busy. To the brain, they suggest that particular shop is a place in which intelligent life does not thrive.

My second criticism is of people who fail to use adverbs to qualify verbs, saying things like "he ate real quick".

Some people do that because they don't know any better. But there are also those who seem to feel that adverbs are unnecessary and should be excised from the language. I downloaded an article the other day from a website that boasted of offering "Everything you Need to be a Better Journalist". Its author wrote "For years, I've known without a doubt what to do if I found an adverb in my copy: exterminate the sucker."

On reading it carefully, though, I realised that he didn't fully understand what adverbs were. He seemed to think they were words used only to qualify the verb 'to say', as in "he said, glowingly", as used after "don't worry, the radiation level isn't very high". Lots of good writers recommend that adverbs ought not to be used like that, as a general rule, because they call attention to themselves, and make it hard not to descend quickly to the level of silliness. (Of course, if silliness is your purpose, then adverbs used in that way would be a great boon.)

The point with the poor, maligned adverb is that it has as much of a part to play in conveying meaning as an adjective does. Something like "Richard talks careless", or "he ate real quick", is a train wreck in the business of moving ideas from one place to another. If you say something like that out loud, people will be so busy thinking about the mistake you've made, they won't hear anything else you say for a while. That's an especial shame if you're trying to sell them something.

Let's talk for a moment about bringing and taking and coming and going. How many times have you heard someone, say a news announcer, say that a man in Afghanistan had said "he would bring his rifle home after he had finished work", or that he had promised his wife "he would come home with his rifle". That doesn't work. Bring and come are very location-specific. I can ask someone to bring something to me in my office, but the moment I step outside the door, I must speak of something being taken, not brought, to my office.

Here's another common mistake - getting your tenses mixed up in reported speech. When reporters write about what someone says, they either put it in quotes, which mean it is exactly what was said, word for word, or they put it in reported speech. This is a form in which verbs go back a tense … present becomes past, for example, and future becomes conditional. Once you understand that, and get a little practice in, it becomes easy… second nature. But even presidents of the United States get it wrong! This is from the Chinese translation (don't ask) of Bill Clinton's book: "She (Hillary) was as beautiful as a princess. I told her my name is Big Watermelon." Talk about tangled! It should have been either "I told her 'my name is Big Watermelon'", or "I told her my name was Big Watermelon". You wait, he'll blame the translator!

Here's a kind of corollary to that. The purpose of reported speech is to preserve the truth of what people say. If a man, in court, said "I killed her this morning", a newspaper that published those very words the next day without quotation marks around them, in the form "he said he killed her this morning", wouldn't be telling the truth. So some words have to change in order to preserve the truth of the report over time. In reported speech, "today" has to become "that day", "tomorrow" becomes "the next day", or "the following day".

My next little rant is about people who write "I'm alright, Jack", or something like that. There is no such thing as alright. I suppose people are expecting that all and right would come together, following the example set by already, or altogether, but it doesn't. It's all right. Always.

Hyphens are a pain in the neck, aren't they? No two experts seem to agree what's right and what's not. I tend to be a minimalist, in the sense that I don't use them unless I have to…generally unless not using them would interfere with the meaning intended. Fowler gives a good example: "There is stodge as well as sublimity hidden away in Bach's 200-odd cantatas." Take the hyphen out, and the meaning really is changed, isn't it?

Any compound adjective ought to be hyphenated, as in 'red-hot pepper'. But when those words are not being used adjectivally, as in 'the pepper is red hot', there is no longer any need. Accepted use of hyphens seems to be in a state of change at the moment. Once, almost any combination of words intended to be read together, like oil-for-food, or book-binder, would be hyphenated. Nowadays, the tendency is to put many of the two-word combinations together as one word, like bookbinder.

Finally, the rule on numbers in almost every publication in the world is that you should spell out from one to nine, then use numerals for 10 and above. People read figures used correctly every day of their lives. But they still get it wrong. I have to point out, though, where figures are concerned, that there are a ton of exceptions to the rule - the ages of people and animals; street numbers; figures in charts and tables; figures that include decimals; percentages; sums of money; times of the day; days of the month; latitude and longitude; degrees of temperature; dimensions, measurements and weights and, always, the Ten Commandments. I may have left some out.

There are some people in the world who insist on using both - that is, "any person who breaks this law is liable to a penalty of five (5) years in jail." They feel, I think, that doing that makes what they are saying sound more official and important. But think about it. Can there be a single, solitary soul anywhere in the world who would understand the one, but not the other?

All right, that's it. Cup Match rant over. Thanks for bearing with me.

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