Usage Guides 2.0 (original) (raw)

Abstract

Public debates on language use today have switched platforms from newspaper columns to blogs and forums, and usage guides have changed their shape and form. As Anne Curzan notes in Fixing English (2014), the most influential prescriptive tools nowadays are not usage guides, but rather the red and green squiggly lines of Microsoft’s grammar checker. Studies also indicate that native speakers most commonly turn to the Internet when in doubt about matters of usage (see Ebner forthc. Kostadinova forthc.). In an effort to analyse the different functionalities and advantages of online sources on usage and in order to understand what preferences users have in seeking grammar advice online, I conducted an online survey in April 2014 on the blog created within the project Bridging the Unbridgeable: linguists, prescriptivists and the general public (http://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/). Respondents were asked to give information on which online sources on language use they regularly consulted. In this paper, I report on the results of the survey which served as a starting point for evaluating online sources that implicitly or explicitly provide guidance on usage. From ‘googling it’, consulting online dictionaries, drawing on language corpora, Wikipedia, language blogs, and add-ons such as Grammarly, I will discuss the benefits and shortcomings of these different resources and evaluate each of them from the perspective of the debate between prescriptive and descriptive approaches to the English language. The online resources provided by the informants are rated on the basis of different criteria, including ease of use, the amount of the provided linguistic context and availability.

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