Patricia Ellman
English Grammar For Economics
And Business
For students & professors with English as a Foreign Language
Download free books at
Download free eBooks at bookboon.com
2

Patricia Ellman
English Grammar For Economics
And Business
For students & professors with English as a
Foreign Language
Download free eBooks at bookboon.com
3

English Grammar For Economics And Business: For students & professors with English as a
Foreign Language
2
nd
edition
© 2014 Patricia Ellman &
bookboon.com
ISBN 978-87-403-0653-8
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English Grammar For
Economics And Business
4
Contents
Contents

Section 1: Analysis of presence or absence of the denite articles
in various foreign languages 123
Section 2: e rst Diagnostic Test 133
Section 3: e most widely-used constructions using the denite
and indenite articles 140
Section 4: Final remarks on the use of the and a/an (not always as articles) 157
Section 5: Reference essay: A key to the application of the
80 Rules for using/not using the articles 164
Section 6: Concluding remarks to Chapter 5 186
6 About the Author 188
7 Endnotes 189
360°
thinking
.
© Deloitte & Touche LLP and affiliated entities.
Discover the truth at www.deloitte.ca/careers
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6
I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar.
Benjamin Disraeli
1

(written when correcting the proofs of his last Parliamentary speech on 31 March 1881)
2
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English Grammar For
Economics And Business
7
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements

e following points of English grammar, style and presentation are those which are most relevant for
economics and business students with fairly advanced English as a Foreign Language (EFL). is guide
represents a distillation on a need-to-know basis of the myriad points of grammar found in standard
textbooks. Some students with EFL have access to in-house English courses, but many do not, and those
who do oen say they are too general to be useful.
e selected solecisms mainly concern the most common types of error that I have encountered over
the course of 30 years, when working on around 2000 texts (articles, theses and books, both single- and
multi-author) produced by EFL M.Phil. and Ph.D. students and academics. My client base includes
authors from many dierent countries (e.g. the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal – including the Canary
Islands, France, the Central and Eastern European countries, Morocco, Turkey, Ethiopia, Pakistan,
Indonesia, and China. ey write on a wide range of subjects, such as taxation policy, corporate social
responsibility, educational economics, environmental economics (including insurance and measures
taken against ood risk; road pricing; containerization; and airport logistics), urbanization processes,
and network theory applied to commuting.
Amongst other things, the guide tackles such constantly recurring grammatical problems as:
• How to correctly place those slippery words: already, also, oen and only in a sentence;
• When to use, or not use, the denite and indenite articles (the, a/an);
• How to decide whether to use like or such as;
• When to use less and fewer, few and little, big, large and great; and
• How to choose between compared to and compared with.
In many cases, there is a clear right or wrong usage, but sometimes it is a case of knowing what is formal
style, suitable for scholarly texts, and what is informal and therefore inappropriate in such texts. On a
few occasions, it is simply a question of making a choice between two equally acceptable forms, and
then sticking to that choice consistently.
To help with my explanations, I have consulted the following works:
Atkinson, Max, Lend me Your Ears. All you need to know about making speeches and presentations,
Random House, UK, 2004. (An invaluable reference work for those, like Dutch Ph.D. students, who have
to defend their thesis, oen in English, in public.)
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English Grammar For

exercises which provide limited practice in the use of the denite and indenite articles; but, in this respect,
see also the Diagnostic Tests in Chapter 5, Sections 2 and 5 in this present guide).
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English Grammar For
Economics And Business
10
Introductory Remarks and Reference Works Consulted
Fowler, H.W., Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Oxford University Press, First Edition, 1926. Revised ird
Edition by R.W. Burcheld, 1998. (An enormously readable, oen witty, guide to the complexities of the
English language.)
Gooden, Philip, Who’s Whose? A No-Nonsense Guide to Easily Confused Words, A & C Black Publishers
Limited, London, Second Edition, 2007.
Gordon, Karen, e Transitive Vampire. An Adult Guide to Grammar, Severn House Publishers Ltd.
London, 1985. (Endorsed as ‘extremely bizarre’ by Frank Muir, but has a good explanation of squinting
modiers; see also Chapter 1 of this present guide.)
Gwynne, N.M., Gwynne’s Grammar. e Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and the Writing of Good
English, Ebury Press, UK, 2013. (e latest, but still totally traditional, primer.)
Keleny, Guy, Errors and Omissions. (An informative column which appears every Saturday in e
Independent, an English newspaper. It picks out the main lapses of grammar and style in that paper
during the previous week.)
Keynes, Maynard, Essays in Biography, Part II Lives of Economists, Mercury Books, 1961. First published
in 1933. (An example of an English economist who wrote well.)
Lamb, Bernard C., A National Survey of UK Undergraduates’ Standards of English, e Queen’s English
Society, 1992. (Contains some surprising ndings – see
p. 13 of this present guide.)
Lamb, Bernard C., e Queen’s English and How to Use It, O’Mara Books, 2011.
Leech, Georey & Jan Svartik, A Communicative Grammar of English, Second edition, Longman, 1994.
McCloskey, D., Economical Writing, Waveland Press Inc., Long Grove, Illinois, 1999. (is little book is
specically addressed to improving the writing style of economists – see also Chapter 2 of this guide.)
Quest, e Journal of the Queen’s English Society. (is quarterly journal is devoted to encouraging the