From one of America's most influential writing teachers, a collection of 50 of the best writing strategies distilled from 50 writing and language books -- from Aristotle to Strunk and White. With so many excellent writing guides lining bookstore shelves, it can be hard to know where to look for the best advice. Should you go with Natalie Goldberg or Anne Lamott? Maybe William Zinsser or Donald Murray would be more appropriate. Then again, what about the classics -- Strunk and White, or even Aristotle himself? Thankfully, your search is over. In Murder Your Darlings, Roy Peter Clark, who for more than 30 years has been a beloved and revered writing teacher to children and Pulitzer prize-winners alike, has compiled a remarkable collection of 50 of the best writing tips from 50 of the best writing books of all time. With a chapter devoted to each piece of advice, Clark expands and contextualizes the original author's suggestions, and offers anecdotes about how each one helped him or other writers sharpen their skills. An invaluable resource for scribblers of all kinds, Murder Your Darlings is an inspiring and edifying ode to the craft of writing.

English Grammar Workbook For Dummies, UK Edition is grammar First Aid for anyone wanting to perfect their English and develop the practical skills needed to write and speak correctly. Each chapter focuses on key grammatical principles, with easy-to-follow theory and examples as well as practice questions and explanations. From verbs, prepositions and tenses, to style, expressions and tricky word traps, this hands-on workbook is essential for both beginners looking to learn and practise the basics of English grammar, and those who want to brush up skills they already have - quickly, easily, and with confidence. English Grammar Workbook For Dummies, UK Edition covers: Part I: Laying the Groundwork: Grammar Basics Chapter 1: Placing the Proper Verb in the Proper Place Chapter 2: Matchmaker, Make Me a Match: Pairing Subjects and Verbs Correctly Chapter 3: Who Is She, and What Is It? The Lowdown on Pronouns Chapter 4: Finishing What You Start: Writing Complete Sentences Part II: Mastering Mechanics Chapter 5: Exercising Comma Sense Chapter 6: Made You Look! Punctuation Marks That Demand Attention Chapter 7: One Small Mark, a Whole New Meaning: Apostrophes Chapter 8: "Let Me Speak!" Quotation Marks Chapter 9: Hitting the Big Time: Capital Letters Part III: The Pickier Points of Correct Verb and Pronoun Use Chapter 10: The Case of It (And Other Pronouns) Chapter 11: Choosing the Best Pronoun for a Tricky Sentence Chapter 12: Travelling in Time: Tricky Verb-Tense Situations Chapter 13: Are You and Your Verbs in the Right Mood? Part IV: All You Need to Know about Descriptions and Comparisons Chapter 14: Writing Good or Well: Adjectives and Adverbs Chapter 15: Going on Location: Placing Descriptions Correctly Chapter 16: For Better or Worse: Forming Comparisons Chapter 17: Apples and Oranges: Improper Comparisons Part V: Writing with Style Chapter 18: Keeping Your Balance Chapter 19: Spicing Up and Trimming Down Your Sentences Chapter 20: Steering Clear of Tricky Word Traps Part VI: The Part of Tens Chapter 21: Ten Over-corrections Chapter 22: Ten Errors to Avoid at All Cost

At every pivotal moment in American history there has been a great speech. Speeches inspired the Revolution and healed the wounds of the Civil War. Speeches abolished slavery, won women the right to vote, and sent millions of Americans into wars overseas. At their best, speeches can frame the issues of the day and inspire the nation to great acts.
Words That Changed America brings together one hundred of the most influential and important speeches in our history.
In the chapter titled "Revolution," Patrick Henry demands liberty or death in 1775; Elizabeth Cady Stanton declares the self-evident truth that "all men and women" are created equal in 1848; and Martin Luther King describes his dream in 1963.
In "Free Speech," Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist publisher, defends the freedom of the press in 1837--days before a pro-slavery mob will kill him for exercising it. Eugene Debs gives the defiant "Canton, Ohio Speech" opposing World War I, for which he is jailed.
In "America's Place in the World," George Washington warns Americans in his 1796 Farewell Address against entangling alliances with Europe; Woodrow Wilson declares war on Germany in 1917; Franklin D. Roosevelt draws America further into World War II with his "Arsenal of Democracy" speech; John F. Kennedy announces his commitment to human rights (and opposition to Communism) in his bold 1961 Inaugural Address; and Ronald Reagan stands at the Berlin Wall in 1987 and dares Mikhail Gorbachev to tear it down.
Rounding out speeches of clear historical importance are selections chosen for their depth, spirit, and humor. Eli Wiesel describes the dangers of indifference. Lou Gehrig, stricken with the disease that now bearshis name, bids farewell to Yankees fans. And Mark Twain ponders the weather in New England.
The result is a vivid, engaging history of America, drawn in the words of the men and women who shaped it.

Gateways to Academic Writing: Effective Sentences, Paragraphs, and Essays provides a fully integrated program of writing instruction for high-intermediate to advanced students of English. The book's four units give students the tools they need to improve their academic writing. Unit I introduces the writing process, from exploring ideas, organizing, and drafting to revising, editing, and proofreading. Unit II examines the ten modes of writing, including narration, all forms of exposition, persuasion, and summary and response. Unit III presents key terminology, sentence structures, and verb tenses and forms. Unit IV gives students extensive editing practice, including Editing for Mastery exercises. Features *Clear explanations, practical and contextualized exercises, and visual aids make this book easy to use. *Examples of professional and student writing provide students with meaningful models. *Guidelines for Success at the end of each unit summarize key learning points. *Nine additional readings provide examples of rhetorical modes, practice in close reading, questions for analysis, and writing prompts.

English Sentence Constructions departs from a usage-based theoretical perspective in which all language units -- which we refer to as constructions -- have both a meaning and form, and context is all-important in determining the function and form of these constructions. As a starting-level module, English Sentence Constructions guides students of English or Language at tertiary level through different levels of analysis at the sentence, clause, phrase, and word level. The book starts with an explanation of different sentence types and structures (Chapters 1 and 2), zooms in on the verb phrase as the central component of any sentence (in Chapters 3 and 4), before zooming in even closer, discussing word classes (Chapter 5) and phrases (Chapter 6). The next two chapters explicate the intricacies of sentence constituents that function as clauses (Chapter 7) and aid students in integrating all chapters by discussing sentence analysis at all levels (Chapter 8). The last chapter (Chapter 9) shows how knowledge about sentence constructions can be applied to effective writing in English. English Sentence Constructions can be used in teacher-led modules, but the many exercises in each chapter, the clearly worked out answer keys, and a comprehensive glossary of terminology also make it suitable for self-study. For each chapter, there is an online test in which students can check their understanding.

Drawing on vast amounts of new data from live, unscripted radio and TV broadcasts, and the internet, this is a brilliant and original analysis of colloquial English, revealing unusual and largely unreported types of clause structure. Andrew Radford debunks the myth that colloquial English has a substandard, simplified grammar, and shows that it has a coherent and complex structure of its own. The book develops a theoretically sophisticated account of structure and variation in colloquial English, advancing an area that has been previously investigated from other perspectives, such as corpus linguistics or conversational analysis, but never before in such detail from a formal syntactic viewpoint.

'Fascinating... I loved this book; I really did' David Crystal, Spectator A biography of a much misunderstood punctuation mark and a call to arms in favour of clear expression and against stifling grammar rules. Cecelia Watson used to be obsessive about grammar rules. But then she began teaching. And that was when she realized that strict rules aren't always the best way of teaching people how to make words say what they want them to; that they are even, sometimes, best ignored. One punctuation mark encapsulates this thorny issue more clearly than any other. The semicolon. Hated by Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut and Orwell, and loved by Herman Melville, Henry James and Rebecca Solnit, it is the most divisive punctuation mark in the English language, and many are too scared to go near it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care? In this warm, funny, enlightening and thoroughly original book, Cecelia Watson takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the surprising history of the semicolon and explores the remarkable power it can wield, if only we would stop being afraid of it. Forget the rules; you're in charge. It's time to make language do what you want it to.

Do your sentences run longer than a page? Or do they hang in the air, waiting for a subject, an object or some punctuation to finish them off?
This easy-to-use guide to sentence writing not only teaches you how to overcome run-ons and sentence fragments, but also all of the sentence construction obstacles encountered by anyone who needs to master (or re-master) the English language-all without making you do a single dreaded diagram You'll learn a sentence-combining approach to writing that goes beyond helping you avoid errors by teaching you how to create sound sentences with variety and style.
You'll also find:
Clear discussions of rules and strategies for good writing.
Easy-to-understand explanations and plenty of exercises, from fill-in-the-blanks to transforming short sentences into longer and more graceful combinations.
An answer key at the back of the book to encourage you to work at your own pace and check your answers as you go.
Even if you can't spare 30 minutes a day to learn how to write brilliant sentences, "Better Sentence Writing in 30 Minutes a Day" allows you to customize your learning to take as little as five minutes a day.
Just like its companion guides in the Better English Series, this book is just what the teacher ordered

This work is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Sierra Popoluca, a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken by approximately 28,000 people in Veracruz, Mexico. This detailed description and analysis includes an overview of the language and its family, its typological features and its phonology. The grammar also provides an overview of the word classes, including verbs, nouns, relational nouns/postpositions, adjectives, adverbs, numbers, and formative types. The bulk of this grammar is devoted to the morphosyntax of Sierra Popoluca, including nouns and nominal morphology, verbs and verbal morphology, and the mechanisms for expressing tense, aspect, mood, and modality. An agglutinating, polysynthetic, head-marking language with ergative-absolutive alignment and sensitivity to animacy and saliency hierarchies, Sierra Popoluca has a number of strategies to form complex predicates, which include verb serialization, noun incorporation, and dependent verb constructions. These complex predicate formation strategies and sentence-level syntax are also described here. A compilation of interlinearized texts appears in the appendix. There is no competing work that provides the breadth and depth of coverage of the Sierra Popoluca grammar.

Improve your English grammar You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by using proper English language and grammar. The ability to articulate and communicate effectively is a valuable asset in all aspects of life. From writing a research paper to giving a presentation at work or just holding a casual conversation with friends or family, strong verbal and written skills are necessities in everyday communication. English Grammar Workbook For Dummies is the perfect solution for sharpening the tools in your grammar kit, with lessons and plenty of practice opportunities to help reinforce learning. Whether you need to brush up on the finer points of punctuation, need help making sense of those pesky parts of speech--or anything in between--this approachable guide makes it fast and easy. - Find FREE quizzes for every chapter online - Handle pronouns with grace - Master plurals and possessives - Improve your proofreading skills Everyone benefits from using proper grammar and speech, and now you can too!

For nearly forty years, Understanding and Using English Grammar has been the go-to grammar resource for students and teachers alike. Its time-tested approach blends direct grammar instruction with carefully sequenced practice to develop all language skills. New to This Edition Pretests at the start of each chapter enable learners to check what they already know. Updated grammar charts reflect current usage and highlight differences between written and spoken English. A new chapter on article usage. A variety of high-interest readings include reviews, articles on current topics, and blogs that focus on student success. Additional incremental practice helps learners better grasp concepts, while thematic exercises and integrated tasks offer more contextualized language use. Step-by-step writing activities are supported by writing tips and pre-writing and editing tasks. New Essential Online Resources include Student Book audio, Student Book answer key, Grammar Coach videos, and self-assessments.

Puzzled by past tenses? Confused be comparatives? The English for Everyone Grammar Guide is packed with easy-to-follow English grammar rules and annotated sample sentences. Ideal for English test preparations or ESL lesson plans, the Grammar Guide uses visual teaching methods to introduce English grammar for beginners, reinforced through a variety of exercises and examples when used alongside our Grammar Practice Book. Once you have built up your confidence in the written English language, the Grammar Guide can act as a reference point for more advanced sentence structures in practical English usage. About English For Everyone English for Everyone is a series of guides and practice books that support English learning for teenagers and adults from a beginner level, to intermediate, and advanced practical English. Offering an easy-to-follow format that offers guidance for both teaching English as a foreign language, and a self-study approach with resources available to improve English speaking, reading and writing. Whether you are looking for ESL teaching resources, or a structured programme for adults to learn English as a second language, the English for Everyone Series provides: - Sample language examples: New language topics are introduced in context using clear, illustrated, and colour-coded explanations - Supporting audio: Extensive English-speaking audio materials integrated into every unit, giving vital oral and listening practice. (All supplementary audio is available on the DK English for Everyone website and IOS/Android App). - Quick referencing: Easy-to-follow units, mirrored in both the Course and Practice Books for easy referencing and teaching - Sentence formation guides: Visual break downs of essential English grammar in use, showing learners how to recreate even complex English sentences - Visual English vocabulary cues: Lists of useful English words and common phrases with visual aids are available throughout the book - Personalised learning: Write-on lines encourage ESL learners to write their prompts and translations The English for Everyone Series covers the skills and topics required for all major global English-language exams and reference frameworks including: - CEFR - TOEFL - IELTS - TOEIC

A bona fide publishing phenomenon, Lynne Trussas now classic #1 "New York Times" bestseller "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" makes its paperback debut after selling over 3 million copies worldwide in hardcover.

We all know the basics of punctuation. Or do we? A look at most neighborhood signage tells a different story. Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now text messages, we have made proper punctuation an endangered species.

In "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," former editor Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with. BACKCOVER: Praise for Lynne Truss and "Eats, Shoots & Leaves":
"Eats, Shoots & Leaves" amakes correct usage so cool that you have to admire Ms. Truss.a
aJanet Maslin, "The New York Times"
aWitty, smart, passionate.a
a"Los Angeles Times Book Review," Best Books Of 2004: Nonfiction
aWho knew grammar could be so much fun?a
a"Newsweek"
aWitty and instructive. . . . Truss is an entertaining, well-read scold in a culture that could use more scolding.a
a"USA Today" aTruss is William Safire crossed with John Cleeseas Basil Fawlty.a
a"Entertainment Weekly"
aLynne Truss has done the English-speaking world a huge service.a
a"The Christian Science Monitor"
aThis book changed my life in small, perfect ways like learning how to make better coffee or fold an omelet. Itas the perfect gift for anyone who cares about grammar and a gentle introduction for those who donat care enough.a
a"The Boston Sunday Globe"
aLynne Truss makes [punctuation] a joy to contemplate.a
a"Elle"
aIf Lynne Truss were Roman Catholic Iad nominate her for sainthood.a aFrank McCourt, author of "Angelaas Ashes"
aTrussas scholarship is impressive and never dry.a
aEdmund Morris, "The New York Times Book Review"

Essential Mandarin Chinese Grammar is a systematic overview of Mandarin grammar, oriented toward self-study, English-speaking students. Through explanations of common mistakes learners make, useful example sentences and exercises with an answer key, this book provides a detailed introduction to the unique grammar structures of the Mandarin language. Ideal for any student who is interested in taking their skills to the next level, this book makes the difficult task of perfecting grammar efficient, interesting and rewarding. Essential Mandarin Chinese Grammar is a perfect tool to help you form correct and natural-sounding sentences, and determine how to best use the grammar you need for reading or writing Mandarin. Each example and exercise is written in both pinyin and Simplified Chinese Characters to accommodate learners with varying levels of character literacy, including those who have learned only to speak but not read.