Presenting extensive entertaining explanations of the rules of punctuation, this revised and expanded book offers advice on punctuation and a "bizarre comedy of manners." Whimsical illustrations and the travails of numerous fictional characters accompany explanations of the rules of punctuation. Chapters in the book address the…

Reviews and compares views of grammarians, usage experts, and authors of technical writing books concerning "dangling participles." Finds many unattached clauses are unacceptable, some are less objectionable, and still others are acceptable. Notes that cultural (and perhaps gender) differences between humanistic teachers and…

Contends that the rule "do not split infinitives" is a proper subset of the rule "do not split verbs," and that both should be taught. (DD)

A defense of the grammatical correctness of the sentence, "Let us go then, you and I." (DD)

Rhetorical and linguistic concepts of the sentence are reviewed in the course of introducing the concept of the "minor sentence" (sentence fragments which may occur alone as complete linguistic utterances or which may be combined by parataxis or coordinators with a major sentence). Rather than restraining beginning writers from using…

Describes three experiments that explored the informational roles of emphasis and word order in active sentences. The results, when considered together, strongly implicate recentness, but not emphasis, as an important means of linking temporally contiguous sentences. (HTH)

Examines the influence of oral message organization on fact recall, patterning and problem-solving. (MH)

This study explored the viability of several theories in describing adjective memory. For the study, college students were told either to form images or to learn sentences. A noun-prompted sentence recall task exposed their memory for adjectives modifying either subject nouns. Results revealed that subject modifiers were better remembered than…

Noting that grammar is alive, changing, and controversial, this book offers a combination of guidelines and creative language use for people who have already been exposed to the rules of grammar to help them start building their own style of speaking and writing. The first part of the book "Recalling the Parts of Speech," provides a…

Stylistics, the art of making effective choices in writing, depends on synonymy. This means that writers, depending on the purpose, the audience, and the context of their messages, will rephrase those messages to improve their effectiveness. Paraphrasing messages to fit the needs of particular situations depends on a number of stylistic variables…

Compares cohesive ties and chains in the good and poor essays of college freshmen. Results indicate that longer chains, greater variety of words, and greater maturity or word choice characterize good writing. (SRT)

What errors in English subject-to-verb agreement reveal about the syntactic nature of sentence subjects was investigated. Participants in 3 experiments included 104 undergraduates and 64 members of a university community. Results suggest the abstract syntactic relation of subject controls/mediates verb agreement, not notional properties and…

Using straightforward, easy-to-understand language, this handbook of English provides hundreds of examples to illustrate in specific detail what is proper in all areas of English grammar, style, and writing. The handbook provides learning exercises at the end of every chapter for a thorough review of the concepts covered in the chapter. The first…

Readers are "dumb" because they are not privy to the mind and intentions of the writer; and the failure of the unsuccessful writer is a failure to forecast what it is going to be like to be a dumb reader of the document. Sample sentences from students' writing illustrate the following types of writing problems, which force the reader to examine…

Discusses the rules governing the usage of the indefinite article in Spanish. (HP)