Everyday Grammar A Guide To Good Usage

Everyday Grammar

Garner's Modern English Usage

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 providing instruction on skillful, persuasive, and vivid writing. Garner liberates English from two extremes: both from the hidebound "purists" who mistakenly believe that split infinitives and sentence-ending prepositions are malfeasances and from the linguistic relativists who believe that whatever people say or write must necessarily be accepted. The judgments here are backed up not just by a lifetime of study but also by an empirical grounding in the largest linguistic corpus ever available. In this fourth edition, Garner has made extensive use of corpus linguistics to include ratios of standard terms as compared against variants in modern print sources. No other resource provides as comprehensive, reliable, and empirical a guide to current English usage. For all concerned with writing and editing, GMEU will prove invaluable as a desk reference. Garner illustrates with actual examples, cited with chapter and verse, all the linguistic blunders that modern writers and speakers are prone to, whether in word choice, syntax, phrasing, punctuation, or pronunciation. No matter how knowledgeable you may already be, you're sure to learn from every single page of this book.

Action Grammar

If terms like "transitive verb," "objective case," and "dangling participle" make your eyes glaze over, this book is for you. The only grammar guide to recognize that most adults have forgotten all the rules they learned in school, Action Grammar focuses on what you need to know to speak and write correctly in business and in everyday life. Organized to give you fast, easy answers to the questions that come up most often, Action Grammar features useful exercises to help you sort out the more puzzling points of spoken and written English, as well as dozens of up-to-date examples of correct (and incorrect) usage, from where to put a comma to when to use "me" rather than "I." For everyone who wants to use the right word in the right place, punctuate properly, and spell correctly, here's a must-have reference that will do wonders for your command of the language.