Disputed English grammar

MIND OUR ENGLISH Thursday July 12, 2007
New edition with new additions
By CATHERINE SIOW
MacMillan English Dictionary For Advanced Learners New Edition Publisher: Macmillan Education, 1,478 pages
THIS new – and second – edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary (MED) continues to build on its successful formula of innovative features and user-friendliness that has won it several prestigious awards, including the ESU English Language Book Award (2002) and the British Council’s ELT Innovation Award (2004).
The MED now comes packed with a wealth of new material, making it even more relevant to the needs of its users as the continuously changing English language responds to the world’s social, political and technological developments.
It contains hundreds of new words such as satnav, greenwash, carbon trading, adspend, crystal meth, cyberlaw and geoeconomics.
It has many more collocations, synonyms and antonyms. The collocation boxes list words that frequently occur together, to help users write natural-sounding English.
There are menus in longer entries that take you straight to the right meaning. ‘Get it right’ boxes at individual headwords help you to anticipate mistakes that you might make and show you how to correct them. These boxes also often highlight common collocations, present alternatives to overused words and point out the differences between words that are easy to confuse.
Several “metaphor” boxes have been added. These reveal the connections between all the words and phrases we use for expressing particular ideas and emotions.
There is a complete new set of new language awareness articles written specially for this edition. The pages are designed to give up-to-date information on relevant topics and to give you a deeper understanding of such areas as idioms, metaphors, and word formation.
The new MED has extra clearly labelled subject-specific vocabulary such as equity capital, faultline, heritage language, link rot, culture medium and data compression. These are among the additional 4,000 items of specialist vocabulary, with a focus on six key subject areas: business and economics, science, information technology, medicine, tourism, and the arts.
Another new feature is the multi-page vocabulary building sections on the themes of movement, communication and emotions. Each section takes a “core” word that you will probably use most of the time and gives you the most useful synonyms for it, as well as related words with a different part of the speech. There are also notes that highlight some differences in register, grammar and collocation. Some of the words are shown together with their antonyms.
Perhaps the most important innovation is that on the productive task of writing and speaking natural English. The new “Improve your writing skills” section in the centre of the dictionary gives you advice on writing in 18 areas that often cause difficulties.
These pages deal with vocabulary and grammar problems, present graphs comparing the use of a particular word or phrase by native speakers and learners, and develop the skills you need to write effectively in different professional and academic contexts.
Additionally, this new edition comes with a newly upgraded CD-ROM. A distinctly new feature is the thesaurus. Users who are looking for a better way of expressing an idea can just click on the thesaurus icon and they will be given a range of appropriate vocabulary.
You can enrich your vocabulary in this way and understand difficult words with over 1,300 illustrations, animations and photographs, and more than 300 sound effects.
The new CD-ROM also includes thousands of weblinks that connect you instantly to carefully selected websites offering cultural and encyclopaedic information.
You can also personalise your search with the new view modes that display only as much information about each word as you want, and add your own notes or translations to every entry in the dictionary.
To further help users improve their writing skills, the new CD-ROM contains more than 200 interactive exercises to enable users to practise what they have learned. This unique feature – the product of a two-year research project – makes the MED the best resource for anyone who needs to write essays or reports in accurate, well-structured English.
After reading the above write-up, I sent to The Editor of Mind Our English on the same day my following comments to which I had received on the following day a reply also quoted below:-
To The Editor (on July 12)
Perhaps the most important innovation is that on the productive task of writing and speaking natural English. The new “Improve your writing skills” section in the centre of the dictionary gives you advice on writing in 18 areas that often cause difficulties.

The above is the 10th paragraph of the write-up on MacMillan English Dictionary For Advanced Learners New Edition appearing under the headline New edition with new additions in MIND OUR ENGLISH of Thursday July 12, 2007.
The first sentence of the said paragraph is not a complete sentence and the paragraph should have been, "Perhaps the most important innovation is that on the productive task of writing and speaking natural English, the new “Improve your writing skills” section in the centre of the dictionary gives you advice on writing in 18 areas that often cause difficulties." However, should there be insistence that the paragraph must have two sentences, then the "that" in the first needs to be deleted. Regards, Kengt, Penang
The Editor's Reply (on July 13)

"Perhaps the most important innovation is that on the productive task of writing and speaking natural English." is a complete sentence.

It is saying that there are several innovations but the most important is THAT (meaning "the one") on the productive ... etc.

Best wishes,Kee Thuan ChyeAssociate EditorEditor of Mind our EnglishThe Star