Common Errors in English Usage 2nd Edition

I am a teacher who runs a website about learning and teaching grammar through sentence diagramming.

I'm happy to add this book to my reference library. It's easy to look up errors, and I enjoy the historical and cultural information that Mr. Brians adds into the entries.

I actually interviewed him for my website and asked him more about the book. If you're interested, you can check it out here:

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Happy Learning!
:) Elizabeth

Common Errors in English Usage - As a former teacher, I was too aware of the common errors. The book is great if you are a speaker or writer who has been away from an English class for many years and is accustomed to listening to people who make mistakes. I guess I expected to learn more about the uncommon errors, so this book was predictable to me. It will definitely improve your English.

I read a review of this book and decided it was a book I have been seeking for a long time. If you are a person that wonders about things like whether to use further instead of farther, or lay instead of lie, this is the book for you. Put an end to bungling the English language . . . Common Errors in English is sure to make you seem a lot smarter that you really are.

We heard the author of this book, Paul Brians, being interviewed on The Lionel Show on 1260 AM radio. The book lives up to our expectations. It is an excellent text with easy to find phrases that have been used so often that some believe they are legitimate usages of the English language, but they are not. Highly recommended for English majors, teachers, writers, and just plain folks who enjoy this sort of thing.

Almost six years after the first edition of this book was released, we finally get this second "revised and expanded" edition. And is it worth it? Of course it is! I already wrote a review for the first edition ( Common Errors in English Usage ), so you can read a review of what I thought about the book.

Quick note: An error is when you do not know that you said/wrote something in the wrong way; a mistake is when you DO know you had a slip, even though you know the correct way to say/write the thing correctly.

There are quite a few additions to this edition. You can calculate how many errors were added because the first edition has 250 pages and this new one has 292. Besides that, this new edition is a bit more "cluttered" (my only complaint to be honest, it felt a bit overwhelming and striking to the eyes) than the old one, it has more entries per page. I'd say the new one has 8 entries per page, whilst the old one has 6, in average. For example, on the last pages you can see the "British vs. US English" section. The old edition has 18 entries, but the new one has 31.

There are also many more drawings illustrating (pun intended) the different errors. Said drawings are no longer only in the middle of the page (as in the previous edition), they're basically anywhere on a page. Details like these reflect how much effort was put into this new edition. It's really good, and as with the previous one, quite a laugh! As I hope you already noticed, you have to buy this book!

Edit: This new edition contains over 480 entirely new entries, and over 150 revised ones, along with several new cartoons selected and captioned by Tom Sunner. Some of the revisions expand or clarify the old explanations.... (Taken from the introduction.)