Here’s what he has to say:

Thanks for your response! The appeal succeeded in taking GMAU3 from #4,000 on Amazon.com to a high of #280. It was #1 in dictionaries for a time, and #3 in editing resources. And the book received a good deal of positive attention as a result. Many thanks for your support. Now what the major chains will do is perhaps still a ticklish matter . . .

Good luck, Bryan! We’ll continue to buy the book direct from Oxford if needed . . .  but here’s hoping that Amazon continues to carry it as a result of this grassroots push.

Here’s his note.

If you’re a fan of my usage tips and Garner’s Modern American Usage…

I have a favor to ask of you as a loyal reader: In the next few hours or days, would you please go to www.amazon.com or www.bn.com and buy one or more copies of the new third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage as holiday presents? In fact, keep this gift possibility in mind through the end of the year, won’t you?

I need your help in sending a message to the major bookstore chains: they’re not stocking the book because they’ve told Oxford University Press that they consider usage guides a “defunct category.” It’s maddeningly unbelievable. Please help me show them that they’re stupendously wrong.

Meanwhile, in the coming months you might ask about the book when you’re in a bookstore: ask the managers why they don’t stock copies, and encourage them to do so.

If you’re curious to see what effect you’re having, watch the rankings on Amazon.com or Bn.com in coming days and weeks. We’ll be alerting the major chains to those numbers, and we want to get as close to the top 50 as we can. If you’re trying to order and see that the book is labeled “out of stock,” order anyway: the effort is also to ensure that the online booksellers keep adequate stocks.

In return for this favor – it’s a grassroots effort – I’ll be happy to inscribe copies that you send to LawProse for that purpose, if you (1) include a filled-out FedEx airbill for returning them to you, and (2) suggest an appropriate inscription.

Thank you for whatever help you can provide in this endeavor to show booksellers that the concern for good English is alive and well.

Readers of this blog know that I consider Garner’s Modern American Usage to be an absolutely essential reference for all editors and writers. I turn to it weekly, if not daily, for guidance. It’s almost unbelievable to me that Amazon could consider not carrying it.

If you don’t own a copy of Garner’s or need to update to the next edition, it sounds like now is the time to buy. Maybe if enough people respond to this email Bryan WILL become a close, personal friend.

One can only hope.

(I know, only editors could get excited about this. But I am excited.)

Garner’s is the de facto standard usage guide for American English, offering guidance on burning issues such as when to use farther versus further or when to use which versus that. Garner writes in a highly readable style, and his approach simple and sensible:

Generally, writing is good if readers find it easy to follow; writing is bad if readers find it hard to follow.

He is also highly practical, writing that:

… recommendations on usage must be genuinely plausible. They must recognize the language as it currently stands, encourage reasonable approaches to editorial problems, and avoid refighting battles that were lost long ago.

The need to “recognize the language as it currently stands” and adjust one’s usage decisions accordingly is all the reasoning I need to purchase this third edition of the book.

What are you waiting for?

Mr. Wallace was a writer so brilliant that I often felt that the back of my head was opening up when I read his words. I writer so talented that he could hold together about 14 different threads in the same nonfiction narrative–without confusing the reader one bit. Hearing about his death brings a feeling of sadness and dismay. Sadness at the loss of such a talent, in a time when talented writers aren’t that common. And dismay in realizing that I’ll never again be able to read another new essay by Mr. Wallace.

Here are a few reflections on his death:

New York Times

LA Times

Chicago Tribune

Entertainment Weekly

I also include a link to a David Foster Wallace essay near and dear to my own heart — his review of Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage. If you want to do it proper, subscribe to Harper’s and download it from there. It’s well worth the $16.97.

Correspondent E.F., a great writer and good egg, writes today with a concern from one of her clients …

He seems happy but commented that I use a lot of one-sentence paragraphs. I never noticed this, but it’s probably a holdover from reporting work. Is there a rule against this? He wasn’t really complaining but sort of musing about it because he says writing workshops claim this is a no-no.

My response? One sentence paragraphs are perfectly fine — as long as they are used smartly and judiciously. Moreover, there’s no rule against them, despite what high school English teachers or “workshop leaders” might tell you — and what you might find in Strunk & White’s Elements of Style.

As a rule, single sentences should not be written or printed as paragraphs. An exception may be made of sentences of transition …

But I don’t use S&W as a rulebook, just as a very general primer on good writing — so I disregard this “rule,” and don’t consider it authoritative.

Moreover, William Safire advises against any pedantic insistence that one-sentence paragraphs must never be used. And Bryan Garner writes in his Modern American Usage that “long sentences slow the reading and create a solemn, portentous impression; short sentences speed the reading and the thought.” Couldn’t the same be said of long and short paragraphs?

I advised E.F. to tell her client — if she had to give him an explanation — that in this age of short attention spans, short paragraphs are often preferred to long paragraphs, and one-sentence paragraphs are perfectly acceptable. Short paragraphs help readers access your copy easily and digest it in manageable chunks. They also help draw attention to important points that are significant enough to stand alone — a critical factor to consider knowing that many readers are actually “scanners.”

Of course, it wouldn’t make sense to have every paragraph be one sentence long. Good writers vary the length of their paragraphs, much as they vary the length of their sentences — as part of the process of crafting clear, readable, resonant prose.

Thus, I looked much like a Warner Bros. cartoon character (head spinning, steam coming out of ears, eyes popping) when I found this article from Harper’s Magazine–an extensive essay by Wallace about Garner and his Modern American Usage. It goes far in explaining Garner’s particular genius, putting his MAU in the context of a greater tradition of writing on the English language, and showing why he is such a masterful rhetorician.

An excerpt:

It’s now possible to see that all the autobiographical stuff in ADMAU’s Preface does more than just humanize Mr. Bryan A. Garner. It also serves to detail the early and enduring passion that helps make someone a credible technocrat — we tend to like and trust experts whose expertise is born of a real love for their specialty instead of just a desire to be expert at something. In fact, it turns out that ADMAU’s Preface quietly and steadily invests Garner with every single qualification of modern technocratic Authority: passionate devotion, reason, and accountability (recall “in the interests of full disclosure, here are the ten critical points …”), experience (”that, after years of working on usage problems, I’ve settled on”), exhaustive and tech-savvy research (”For contemporary usage, the files of our greatest dictionary makers pale in comparison with the fulltext search capabilities now provided by NEXIS and WESTLAW”), an even and judicious temperament (see e.g. this from HYPERCORRECTION: “Sometimes people strive to abide by the strictest etiquette, but in the process behave inappropriately”), and the sort of humble integrity (for instance, including in one of the entries a past published usage-error of his own) that not only renders Garner likable but transmits the same kind of reverence for English that good jurists have for the law, both of which are bigger and more important than any one person.

What can I say? Reading the essay was (one of) this girl’s dreams come true.

Friends of mine may know about the infamous editor who once “corrected” me during a job interview–when I was doing the interviewing, mind you–on my pronunciation of the word forte. I pronounced it FOR-tay, only to have said editor, after a few minutes of conversation, mention that “the word should actually be pronounced FORT, because it’s actually a French word.”

Well, needless to say, this editor quickly revealed himself to be a COMPLETE PSYCHO for many other non-linguistic reasons, but I never quite got over his smart-arse comment.

Until today, when I had my revenge. Below, please read the words of My Personal Hero, Bryan Garner, on the correct pronunciation of the word. (BTW, I get tidbits like these daily by subscribing to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day, sent out by Oxford.)

forte (= a person’s strong point) has long been thought to be preferably pronounced with one syllable, like “fort.” That’s because the word is originally French (in which “fort” means “strong,” corruptly made with a feminine “-e” suffix) and is so pronounced. But most speakers of American English use the two-syllable version (/FOR-tay/), probably under the influence of the Italian “forte,” a two-syllable word referring to a musical notation to play loudly. Though it might have been nice to keep the two words separate in pronunciation, that hasn’t happened — and the two-syllable version can no longer be condemned. What can be condemned is the pretentious pronunciation /for-TAY/ and the occasional use of an acute accent on the “-e.”

Take that, creepy editor from the past. Take that!