A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. HIS book is designed to inform you about current problems in English usage so you can make intelligent decisions when communicating. You will find answers to these and many other questions in this book. At the same time we have organized individual chapters alphabetically in an effort to make it easy to find what you are looking for. For many of these problems, it is hard to know what to think.
People sometimes do one thing, sometimes another.
To help you decide we present the opinions of the American Heritage Usage Panel, a group of successful people whose work involves writing or speaking effectively. The Usage Panel has been in existence since 1964. We periodically send the panel members ballots containing usage questions. While the ballots are not scientific surveys in that they are not conducted under controlled circumstances with stringent questioning criteria, they are nonetheless very carefully worded to get useful responses. The examples we use in the questions are actual citations from our files or are sentences that we have adapted from actual citations.