With tips and exercises, this essential reference will help whether you’re writing a memo or a literary masterpiece. If the purpose of a piece of writing is to convey facts, findings, or instructions, it need be read only once for its content to be clear. If its purpose is to entertain or to provoke thought, it makes readers want to come back for more. But no matter what kind of writing it is, a confident grasp of grammar is crucial for making it work better. Revised and updated, this guide covers four essential aspects of good writing: Individual words: spelling variations, hyphenation, frequently confused homonyms, frequently misused words and phrases, irregular plurals and negatives, and uses of capitalization and type style to add special meanings Punctuation: the role of each mark in achieving clarity and affecting tone, and demonstration of how misuses can lead to ambiguity Syntax and structure: agreement of subject and verb, parallel construction, modifiers, tenses, pronouns, active versus passive voice, and more Style: advice on the less hard-and-fast areas of clarity and tone, including sentence length and order, conciseness, simplification, reading level, jargon and cliches, and subtlety With self-test exercises and whimsical literary quotations, Grammatically Correct steers clear of academic stuffiness, focusing on practical strategies and intuitive explanations. The book provides examples to show what ambiguities or misinterpretations might result if rules are not followed, and in cases where there is more than one acceptable way to do something, the approach is not to prescribe one over another but simply to describe the options. Readers of this book will never break the rules of language again—at least not intentionally.
advertisement