With more than a thousand new entries and more than 2,300 word-frequency ratios, the magisterial fourth edition of this book-now renamed Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU)-reflects usage lexicography at its finest. Garner explains the nuances of grammar and vocabulary with thoroughness, finesse, and wit. He discourages whatever is slovenly, pretentious, or pedantic. GMEU is the liveliest and most compulsively readable reference work for writers of our time. It delights while pro...

This newly revised and updated all-in-one grammar reference is a quick and easy way to look up sticky punctuation questions for all style manuals including AP (Associated Press), MLA (Modern Language Association), APA (American Psychological Association), and Chicago Manual of Style.These days, writers wear many different hats: they write college essays, magazine and news articles, sales copy, online newsletters, books, and reports. It's hard to keep the p...

Previously published as part of Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.Online sensation Grammar Girl makes punctuation fun and easy in Grammar Girl's Punctuation 911.Mignon Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, is determined to wipe out bad punctuation—but she's also determined to make the process as painless as possible. A couple of years ago, she created a weekly podcast to tackle some of the most common mistakes people make with grammar. The pod...

Do you cringe when a talking head pronounces “niche” as NITCH? Do you get bent out of shape when your teenager begins a sentence with “and”? Do you think British spellings are more “civilised” than the American versions? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’re myth-informed.In Origins of the Specious, word mavens Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman reveal why some of grammar’s best-known “rules” aren’t—and never were—rules at all. This playfull...

In this fascinating survey of everything from how sounds become speech to how names work, David Crystal answers every question you might ever have had about the nuts and bolts of language in his usual highly illuminating way. Along the way we find out about eyebrow flashes, whistling languages, how parents teach their children to speak, how politeness travels across languages and how the way we talk show not just how old we are but where we’re from and even who we want to be.

Based on the bestselling series from The Great Courses, Building Great Sentences celebrates the sheer joy of language—and will forever change the way you read and write.Great writing begins with the sentence. Whether it’s two words (“Jesus wept.”) or William Faulkner’s 1,287-word sentence in Absalom! Absalom!, sentences have the power to captivate, entertain, motivate, educate, and, most importantly, delight. Yet, the sentence-oriented approach to writing is too o...

Read this sentence: Kill the puppy.Do you know what hooks are present? How many hooks? If you don’t -- you need this book.Every story needs hooks. The best writers know how and where to create them to keep the reader turning the pages. Do you?Within this book you’ll learn:* Four of the most universal of hooks to use, regardless of what you write.* How and where hooks MUST be applied throughout your novel.* Why, even with a gr...

"A provocative and jaunty romp through the dos and don'ts of writing for the internet" (NYT)--the practical, the playful, and the politically correct--from BuzzFeed copy chief Emmy Favilla.A World Without "Whom" is Eats, Shoots & Leaves for the internet age, and BuzzFeed global copy chief Emmy Favilla is the witty go-to style guru of webspeak.As language evolves faster than ever before, what is the future of "correct" writing? Whe...

The perfect guide for students, teachers, and professionals to use in brushing up on their grammar.Have you ever hesitated when choosing between "I" or "me"? Have you had trouble figuring out tricky pronouns like "who" or "whom"? What about those always-troublesome commas–do they go before or after the quotation marks?If you're anything like the rest of us, you struggle with these age-old grammatical issues. In this practical and easy-to-understand handbook, ...

The rich variety of the English vocabulary reflects the vast number of words it has taken from other languages. These range from Latin, Greek, Scandinavian, Celtic, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian to, among others, Hebrew, Maori, Malay, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, andYiddish. Philip Durkin's full and accessible history reveals how, when, and why. He shows how to discover the origins of loanwords, when and why they were adopted, and what happens to them once they have been. The long doc...

This collection of papers investigates two specific linguistic phenomena from the point of view of first- and second-language acquisition. While observations on the acquisition of scrambling or pronominal clitics can be found in the literature, up until the recent past they were sparse and often buried in other issues. This volume fills a long-existing gap in providing a collection of articles which focus on language acquisition but at the same time address the overarching syntactic issues...

This book presents an overview of sociolinguistic research in England. Showcasing developments in sociolinguistic theory, method and application, the chapters examine sociolinguistic topics on different linguistic levels and in different geographical areas across the country. Allowing the reader to engage with contemporary research in the field, each chapter is unique in the topic or geographical area explored. Topics include historical sociolinguistics, British Sign Language, lexical vari...