The glamour of grammar
Subtitle: a guide to the magic and mystery of practical English
By: by Roy Peter Clark.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; Little, Brown and Co.
Published: 2010
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 294
ISBN-13: 9780316027915
Subjects: English language -- Grammar
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Words. Read dictionaries for fun and learning -- Avoid speed bumps caused by misspellings -- Adopt a favorite letter of the alphabet -- Honor the smallest distinctions : even between a and the -- Consult a thesaurus to remind yourself of words you already know -- Take a class on how to cross-dress the parts of speech -- Enjoy, rather than fear, words that sound alike -- Learn seven ways to invent words -- Become your own lexicographer -- Take advantage of the short-word economy of English -- Learn when and how to enrich your prose with foreign words -- Points. Use the period to determine emphasis and space -- Advocate use of the serial comma -- Use the semicolon as a "swinging gate." -- Embrace the three amigos : colon, dash, and parentheses -- Let your ear help govern the possessive apostrophe -- Take advantage of the versatility of quotation marks -- Use the question mark to generate reader curiosity and narrative energy -- Reclaim the exclamation point -- Master the elliptical art of leaving things out -- Reach into the "upper case" to unleash the power of names -- Vary your use of punctuation to create special effects -- Standards. Learn to lie or lay, as well as the principles behind the distinction -- Avoid the "trap" of subject-verb disagreement -- Render gender equality with a smooth style -- Place modifiers where they belong -- Help the reader learn what is "essential" and "nonessential." -- Avoid case mistakes and "hypergrammar" -- Be certain about the uncertain subjunctive and other "moody" subjects -- Identify all sources of ambiguity and confusion -- Show what is literal and what is figurative -- Meaning. Join subjects and verbs, or separate them for effect -- Use active and passive verbs in combination : and with a purpose -- Befriend the lively verb to be -- Switch tenses, but only for strategic reasons -- Politely ignore the language crotchets of others -- Learn the five forms of well-crafted sentences -- Make sentence fragments work for you and the reader -- Use the complex sentence to connect unequal ideas -- Learn how expert writers break the rules in run-on sentences -- Purpose. Master the uses of nonstandard English -- Add a pinch of dialect for flavor -- Tame taboo language to suit your purposes -- Unleash your associative imagination -- Play with sounds, natural and literary -- Master the distinction between denotation and connotation -- Measure the distance between concrete and abstract language -- Harness the power of particularity -- Have fun with initials and acronyms, but avoid "capital" offenses -- Master the grammar of new forms of writing -- Afterword : live a life of language -- Appendix A : words I have misspelled -- Appendix B : words I have confused -- Appendix C : the glamour of grammar quick list.