Writer's Digest Grammar Desk Reference

You'll Love This Book If:

• You want to improve your grammar
• You have questions about usage such as when to use a comma or semicolon
• You are an advanced writer

If you are new to writing, want to brush up on your grammar skills, or improve your writing, The Writer's Digest Grammar Desk Reference is your best resource because it provides you and like-minded writers with in-depth information on grammar, punctuation, and usage.

In fact, throughout the book you'll find extracted erroneous sentences from lively published sources, mostly newspapers and magazines authors Gary Lutz and Diane Stevenson enjoy reading. They write in the introduction, "That our very best writers now and then commit errors should deepen our appreciation of just how demanding the craft of writing is—from drafting, composing, and revising to editing, proofreading, and printing."

The book is divided in four parts; part one provides an overview of grammar, including nouns and verbs, modifiers, phrases, clauses and other parts of speech. Part two covers the rules, conventions and errors to avoid, including subject-verb agreements, verbs usage, parallelism, errors in modification: misplaced, dangling, ambiguous modifiers, personal pronouns, antecedents, and poor elliptical construction. In part three, you'll explore punctuation and its various forms from commas, semicolons, dashes, italics and quotation marks to parentheses, hyphens, and apostrophes. Lastly, in part four, you'll fine tune the mechanics and usage of grammar and discover a glossary of commonly misused words.

In This Book You'll Learn:

• About nouns, verbs, modifiers and other parts of speech
• How to avoid misplaced modifiers, or punctuation errors
• Mechanics and usage - capitalization abbreviations, glossary of commonly misused words

What Other Writers Are Saying About This Book:

""There are some principles of usage I thought I'd never understand. This book has proven me wrong. Clear, illuminating, and comprehensive—this is a must-have resource for grammarians and laymen, alike." — Fiona Maazel, author of Last Last Chance and former managing editor of The Paris Review

"For those who believe the soul is at stake when utterance is at stake, there can be no more saving engagement than that which offers itself within. Huzzah for heroes Lutz and Stevenson! Medals at the ready, please." —Gordon Lish, author of over a dozen books

"Some people—not a few linguists and high-school English teachers among them—foolishly believe that grammar matters not at all. Let them read The Writer's Digest Grammar Desk Reference, which, with an explanation that is cogent, a treatment that is thorough, and examples that are telling, makes it plain that grammar matters mightily." — Robert Hartwell Fiske, author of The Dictionary of Concise Writing: More Than 10,000 Alternatives to Wordy Phrases and the editor and publisher of The Vocabulary Review

"The Grammar Desk Reference is an invaluable resource for the writer—or editor!—in any stage of his or her career. Lutz and Stevenson explain the rules clearly, concisely, and entertainingly, with examples from major newspapers and magazines. I'm keeping a copy on my desk." — Dawn Raffel, Editor at Large, Books at Readers Digest and author of Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, Carrying the Body, and In the Year of Long Division

Wondering what's inside this book? Read an excerpt!

Do you love this book? Write a review!