Do you commit apostrophe atrocities?

Are you tormented by the lie/lay conundrum?

Do you find yourself stuck between floaters and danglers?

Do your subjects and your verbs refuse to agree?

If so, you’re not alone. Some of the most prominent professionals in TV broadcasting and at major newspapers and magazines–people who really should know better–are guilty of making all-too-common grammatical errors. In this delightfully amusing, clever guide, Thomas Parrish points out real-life grammar gaffes from top-notch publications such as the New York Times and the New Yorker to illustrate just how widespread these errors are. With red pen in hand, Parrish’s fictional friend the Grouchy Grammarian leads the charge, examining the forty-seven most common mistakes in English and imparting the basics of good grammar with a charming mixture of fussiness and common sense. All of which makes The Grouchy Grammarian the most entertaining, accessible how-not-to guide you’ll ever read.

This book brings together a series of contributions to the study of grammaticalization of tense, aspect, and modality from a functional perspective. All contributions share the aim to uncover the functional motivations behind the processes of grammaticalization under discussion, but they do so from different points of view.

The new, updated edition of the handbook that should be on every copyeditor's desk. Unstuffy, hip, and often funny, The Copyeditor's Handbook has become an indispensable resource both for new editors and for experienced hands who want to refresh their skills and broaden their understanding of the craft of copyediting. This fourth edition incorporates the latest advice from language authorities, usage guides, and new editions of major style manuals, including The Chicago Manual of Style. It registers the tectonic shifts in twenty-first-century copyediting: preparing text for digital formats, using new technologies, addressing global audiences, complying with plain language mandates, ensuring accessibility, and serving self-publishing authors and authors writing in English as a second language. The new edition also adds an extensive annotated list of editorial tools and references and includes a bit of light entertainment for language lovers, such as a brief history of punctuation marks that didn't make the grade, the strange case of razbliuto, and a few Easter eggs awaiting discovery by keen-eyed readers. The fourth edition features updates on the transformation of editorial roles in today's publishing environment new applications, processes, and protocols for on-screen editing major changes in editorial resources, such as online dictionaries and language corpora, new grammar and usage authorities, online editorial communities, and web-based research tools When you're ready to test your mettle, pick up The Copyeditor's Workbook: Exercises and Tips for Honing Your Editorial Judgment, the essential new companion to the handbook.

The Broadview Pocket Guide to Writing presents essential material from the full Broadview Guide to Writing. Included are key grammatical points, a glossary of usage, advice on various forms of academic writing, coverage of punctuation and writing mechanics, and helpful advice on how to research academic papers. MLA, APA, and Chicago styles of citation and documentation are covered, and each has been revised to include the latest updates. A companion website provides a wealth of interactive exercises, information on the CSE style of citation and documentation, and much more.

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.

The home of trusted Spanish dictionaries for everyday language learning. A unique guide to communicating in Spanish. It will help learners discover expressions and idioms to make their Spanish more natural and fluent, while developing an awareness of Spanish culture. Designed for learners of Spanish of all ages, whether you are learning at school, in evening classes, for business or to go on holiday. The text consists of 250 quirky and interesting Spanish idioms which are arranged into different themes, and are given with simple example phrases to show them in context. Clear and concise language notes provide information on the meaning and background of some idioms, while handy culture notes help explain any cultural differences. Combined with a text which has a selection of illustrations, the Collins Easy Learning Spanish Idioms takes you beyond beginners level and expands your knowledge of frequently used, natural Spanish expressions. Get it right: key idioms and example phrases help improve your knowledge of real Spanish. Get there fast: specially designed for Kindle, with clear and resizable text throughout. Themes help guide you to the type of idiom you're looking for. Have confidence: a fun, useful guide to common Spanish idioms helps you increase your knowledge of natural Spanish and Spanish culture.

Bullshit is everywhere. Some of it is just lazy, some is complete nonsense, and yet some is at least trying to communicate something, even if it fails. Bestselling author Kevin Duncan has been on a life mission to improve business language and understanding. In his latest book, he weeds out the worst offenders, and the contexts in which they most frequently occur, to provide readers with a path to clear communication. The book starts with an examination of why we seem to use so much jargon and non-sensical words and phrases in our daily working lives. Duncan then lists and analyses the 100 most popular examples of bullshit used internally and externally, their real meaning, and rates how harmless or dangerous they are. The book ends with advice on dealing with bullshitters and a manifesto to help anyone achieve clear, bullshit-free communication.

Nearly half a century has passed since Hymes proposed the concept of communicative competence to describe the knowledge and skills required for the appropriate use of language in a social context. During these decades, a number of scholars have applied and refined this concept. In language education, communicative competence has been identified as a major objective of learning. This book will inform readers about communicative competence as a highly complex construct encompassing an array of sub-competencies such as linguistic skills and proficiencies, knowledge of socio-cultural and socio-pragmatic codes, and the ability to engage in textual and conversational discourse. Findings from research in related disciplines have pointed to the significance of factors that can contribute to the attainment of communicative competence. Various teaching practices and relevant Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools will be also introduced and discussed to achieve communicative competence as a complex ability. It is a timely contribution to current research on key areas in the teaching, learning and acquisition of second/foreign languages.

English: An Essential Grammar is written specifically for native speakers, beginning with the basics and going on to deal with phrase, clause and sentence structure, word formation and spelling. This fully revised third edition features new material on: the structure of phrases and clauses light verbs nominal adjectives the Operator preposition to and infinitival to the four thats determiners, prepositions, and common errors With new exercises and answers for all new sections, this Essential Grammar continues to be the ideal reference for anyone who would like to improve their knowledge of English grammar.

'Having been asked many times if he could recommend a definitive guide to use of our glorious language and not satisfied that the right book existed, Lamb wrote it himself' - Yorkshire Post Written by the President of the Queen's English Society and covering all of the basics, this clear and practical guide will teach anyone how to write and use English correctly. What is good English, and why do we need it? The Queen's English shows how the English language, used properly, has great power to instruct, move and entertain people, but used incorrectly, can lead to a lack of clarity and confusion. This book informs in a light-hearted way, reminding readers how to use the basics of grammar, punctuation and spelling, as well as further teaching them new tips and tricks of style, rhetoric, vocabulary and the use of foreign phrases, to give their writing and speech a stylish and impressive flair. The book also shows the perils of using language incorrectly, offering extremely (if unintentionally) humorous examples of where bad English can cause one thing to mean something entirely different! Authoritative yet entertaining, and illustrated with pithy drawings, this is the ideal book for anyone who strives for clear, stylish and accurate communication.

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.

The English language is liberally populated with idioms, similes and metaphors associated with firearms and conflict going back to the 14th Century. Today we use descriptive conversational terminology that can be directly attributed to weapons and the mechanics of war and their application, perhaps not always realising what we are actually referring to. This guide from former Royal Marine, Andrew Rigsby, explains all.

Sunday Times bestselling author Caroline Taggart brings her usual gently humorous approach to punctuation, pointing out what really matters and what doesn't. In Roman times, blocks of text were commonly written just as blocks without even wordspacingnevermindpunctuation to help the reader to interpret them. Orators using such texts as notes for a speech would prepare carefully so that they were familiar with the content and didn't come a cropper over a confusion between, say, therapists and the rapists. As we entered the Christian era and sacred texts were widely read (by priests if not by the rest of us), it became ever more important to remove any likelihood of misinterpretation. To a potential murderer or adulterer, for example, there is a world of difference between 'If you are tempted, yield not, resisting the urge to commit a sin' and 'If you are tempted, yield, not resisting the urge to commit a sin'. And the only surface difference is the positioning of a comma. So yes, you SMS-addicts and 'let it all hang out' Sixties children, punctuation does matter. And, contrary to what people who tear their hair out over apostrophes believe, it is there to help - to clarify meaning, to convey emphasis, to indicate that you are asking a question or quoting someone else's words. It also comes in handy for telling your reader when to pause for breath. Caroline Taggart, who has made a name for herself expounding on the subjects of grammar, usage and words generally (and who for decades made her living putting in the commas in other people's work), takes her usual gently humorous approach to punctuation. She points out what matters and what doesn't; why using six exclamation marks where one will do is perfectly OK in a text but will lose you marks at school; why hang glider pilots in training really need a hyphen; and how throwing in the odd semicolon will impress your friends. Sometimes opinionated but never dogmatic, she is an ideal guide to the (perceived) minefield that is punctuation. By the same author: 9781843176572 My Grammar and I (Or Should That Be 'Me'?) 9781782432944 500 Words you Should Know

This textbook provides a detailed introduction to the study of Latin from the perspective of contemporary linguistics. It adopts some basic tenets of generative grammar in an in-depth analysis of the main phonological, morphological, and syntactic properties of Latin, and offers a step-by-step guide to the universal principles and specific parameters which shape the language, along with comparative data from English and other languages. Latin: A Linguistic Introduction is a user-friendly and essential guide to the synchronic study of Latin as a natural language. The clarity of exposition and the richness of the examples cited provide a new approach to Latin as a topic of linguistic research: although the general structure of the book is like that of a traditional Latin grammar, the discussion of grammatical rules is both more straightforward and more theoretically informed. This textbook is principally suitable for students of Latin and Romance linguistics at undergraduate level and above, but also for teachers and researchers interested in new ways of looking at the study of Latin. It differs from many other textbooks in the field by striking a valuable balance between the longstanding tradition of classical philology and the innovations of contemporary linguistics.

Easy Thai is a practical resource that brings the Thai language to learners and travelers everywhere. This invaluable guide introduces all the basics of the language, as well as vocabulary and tips for typical daily conversation. All dialogues are highly practical, authentic and illustrated with manga for easy memorization. A complete language course and pocket dictionary in one, this book includes: Native-speaker audio recordings Focus on daily communication Structured, progressive lessons An extensive glossary of commonly used words & phrases Pronunciation & sentence structure guide Etiquette tips and cultural dos and don'ts

This volume examines the nature and significance of the reflexive aspect of natural language, its capacity to represent its own structure and use through reported speech and explicit statements about language-use (metapragmatics). It adopts a truly interdisciplinary approach. Part I contains papers outlining the volume's theoretical scope. Parts II and III contain anthropological case studies which show the formal devices behind reflexive usage in a variety of different languages and how they function in cultural life. Finally, Part IV shows the importance of understanding reflexive language in many other areas of the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, psychology, religious studies, sociology and literary studies. Many of the contributors are senior scholars of international reputation: all are innovative researchers. Cumulatively their work here represents a critique of those researchers in the humanities and social sciences who fail to take language seriously both in the lives of those they study and in their own research practices.

Grammatical Complexity in Academic English uses corpus-based analyses to challenge a number of dominant stereotypes and assumptions within linguistics. Biber and Gray tackle the nature of grammatical complexity, demonstrating that embedded phrasal structures are as important as embedded dependent clauses. The authors also overturn ingrained assumptions about linguistic change, showing that grammatical change occurs in writing as well as speech. This work establishes that academic writing is structurally compressed (rather than elaborated); that it is often not explicit in the expression of meaning; and that scientific academic writing has been the locus of some of the most important grammatical changes in English over the past 200 years (rather than being conservative and resistant to change). Supported throughout with textual evidence, this work is essential reading for discourse analysts, sociolinguists, and applied linguists, as well as descriptive linguists and historical linguists.