3.12 avg rating — 1,967 ratings

"The man writes as well as he sings."

3.83 avg rating — 99 ratings

"For a linguist, he has the most awful prose style. Example sentences are meant to show he has a 'wacky' sense of humour, but just show him to be an academic cut off from real world concepts like pragmatics, language change and humour. Plus he spends pages explaining the obvious in great detail with over-emphasis on what's wrong and why, while glossing over important concepts or else writing about them in an impenetrable fashion. Even worse, he changes the rules from one edition to the next, so woe betide a student with a second hand copy.
The problem with syntactic analysis (unless another author explains it better than Burton-Roberts) is that syntax is like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: you can pin down the state of the English language RIGHT NOW or make observations about how we got here and where we will go, but it's impossible to make rules about sentence structure that apply universally to the past, present and future of English. "