Joanne Anderson

If you’re interested in English grammar and its eccentricities, Joanne Anderson’s light-hearted style guide Writely or Wrongly, an unstuffy guide to language stuff is an amusing way to spend a couple of hours.
However, I’m not sure who the audience for this book is meant to be, and I don’t think the book description at Goodreads clarifies it.
I should preface what follows by acknowledging that I don’t read Nine mastheads and so I’ve never seen the ‘popular tips’ referred to. show more

Perhaps because I’ve been a teacher of English as a Second Language, I see the need for a reference book to help out with confusing aspects of our language, and I think it’s important that there be a specifically Australian version. I have a print edition of the Australian Style Manual, and it is excellent (and now free to access online), but its length and formality might be an intimidating barrier for some writers. (Fowler is excellent too, and possibly indispensable for writers or editors submitting to English publishers.) But there is definitely a place for something chattier and less formal, and Australian. (There is a whole chapter in Writely or Wrongly addressing Australian v American English.)

But while I found Writely or Wrongly entertaining and its advice is sound, its format might not suit anyone looking for a succinct guide. I’m thinking of international students at university, I’m thinking of people who had a disrupted education for various reasons, and I’m also thinking of the vast majority of people who through no fault of their own have never had a proper grammar lesson in their lives because their teachers were educated during the grammar-free 1970s. (I know this because I used to give grammar clinics to younger teachers learning Indonesian with me at Gadjah Mada university in Jogyakarta in the 1990s. Our Indonesian lecturers made no allowance for the fact that these teachers had never heard of ‘the passive voice‘ which is a critical aspect of formal Indonesian sentence structure — and bad manners if you don’t use it in some contexts.) I’m also thinking of adults for whom English is a second (third, fourth &c) language and they need to write for professional purposes. If they are the intended audience, the amusing digressions and historical contexts in Writely or Wrongly might not suit.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/09/07/writely-or-wrongly-2023-by-joanne-anderson/ show less