Grammatically Correct - The Essential Guide to Spelling, Style, Usage,
Grammar, and Punctuation
Book description
How does good writing stand out?
If its purpose 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.
Revised and updated, this guide covers four essential aspects of
good writing:
-
Individual wordsÂ-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
-
PunctuationÂ-the role of each mark in achieving clarity and
affecting tone, and demonstration of how misuses can lead to
ambiguity
-
Syntax and structureÂ-agreement of subject and verb,
parallel construction, modifiers, tenses, pronouns, active versus
passive voice, and more
-
StyleÂ-advice on the less hard-and-fast areas of clarity
and tone, including sentence length and order, conciseness,
simplification, reading level, jargon and clichés, and
subtlety
Filled with self-test exercises and whimsical
literary quotations,
Grammatically Correct steers clear of
academic stuffiness, focusing instead on practical strategies and
intuitive explanations.
Discussions are designed to get to the heart of a concept and
provide a sufficient sense of when and how to use it, along with
examples that show what ambiguities or misinterpretations might result
if the rules are not followed. 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 againÂ-unintentionally.
Anne Stilman is a scientific/medical writer and editor.
