Stan Carey at Sentence First:
In ‘Dreams Must Explain Themselves’ (1973), Le Guin touches on the reference works that she consults for her writing (I’m a copy-editor: you can bet my attention spiked at this point), and adds a later note elaborating on the subject. Those works are strikingly, deliberately few:
All my life I have written, and all my life I have (without conscious decision) avoided reading how-to-write things. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary and Follett’s and Fowler’s manuals of usage are my entire arsenal of tools.*
* Note (1989). I use Fowler and Follett rarely now, finding them authoritarian. Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, corrected and supplemented by Miller and Swift’s Words and Women, are my road-atlas to English, and have never led me astray. A secondhand copy of the smallprint Oxford English Dictionary in volumes has been an infinite source of learning and pleasure, but the Shorter Oxford is still good for a quick fix.
The attractive, two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was the first big dictionary I owned, followed over the years by comparable editions from American Heritage, Merriam-Webster, Macmillan, and Chambers (this one slang). I still consult them all, as well as more portable editions (and a bunch of online dictionaries); they form a lexically dense archipelago on the shelf.
More here.
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