Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

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Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	808.042 Fo	4-week checkout	Due 05-24-2024

Dirty words -- Grammar Girl on grammar! -- Let's get it started: starting a sentence -- Punch up your punctuation -- Big and tall: capitalization -- Prozac for pronouns: getting the stuntmen of language under control -- Internet intervention! -- I'm so stylish: style and writing -- Work it.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Makes Grammar Fun submitted by SurfGrape on June 15, 2014, 5:49pm This book was actually fun to read. I learned things I never knew. I discovered some things I've been writing incorrectly. I saw other things that I've been writing correctly, but not for the reasons I'd assumed. Fogarty's lessons were eye-opening, even for someone with a very good grasp of English grammar.

Fogarty sorts out easily confused words like who's and whose. She teaches proper punctuation, shows when to use upper case letters, and explains all those tricky pronouns. She's more about usage than grammar rules. In other words, it does you no good to know what subjunctive tense is. You just have to know when to use was and when to use were. It would be easy to get overwhelmed with rules, but Fogarty gives plenty of entertaining examples and mnemonics.

GRAMMAR GIRL'S QUICK AND DIRTY TIPS FOR BETTER WRITING is a very modern book, discussing rules for email and Twitter, how to punctuate URLs, and the proper way cite websites in news articles or papers. Also, Fogarty is okay with using their as a singular pronoun instead of his or her. It's acceptable to write "a student should always have a pen in their backpack" because English lacks a gender-neutral pronoun and people are already using "their" anyway.

I don't agree with everything Fogarty says. For example, she states that internet and web (as in World Wide Web) should be capitalized, while website should not. I insist on using lowercase for all three words. Happily, Fogarty gives leeway for personal style. It's more important to be consistent. In fact, many rules aren't absolute. Therefore, a personal or corporate style is a must.

it's good even if you don't know about the podcast! submitted by LatitudeB on August 9, 2015, 3:48pm I didn't have expectations about this book from the podcast because I only discovered Grammar Girl a few days before the book was released. I like books about usage, and I enjoyed this one. It's organized in chapters of related usage problems and the rules for the most frequent cases. For many issues, the book gives not only the right way to do it, but demonstrates common wrong ways too, and clearly labels them so you won't pick up the wrong way if you're skimming. Many of the entries include memory devices to help you remember what to do next time.

The drawings and examples were cute, but sometimes the references to Squiggly and Aardvark felt like inside jokes, but fortunately not to the point where I felt like the joke was on me. I didn't know if there were personalities for the characters that would have given me a deeper understanding of the examples they demonstrated, or if they were just generic illustrations.

The voice is consistent, and the delivery is short and sweet, or as the author puts it, quick and dirty. Nothing is belabored that shouldn't be, but each issue is adequately covered for most situations. If an item is controversial, the book mentions the controversy and gives an overview of the major arguments. Matters of style are also identified, even if the author has a strong preference for a particular way.

The last chapter, "Work It," is an unusual chapter for a usage book, and especially valuable. It gives writer-oriented tips for interviewing people, generating ideas, fighting writer's block, and proofreading. Some of the tips it gives are excellent, and in the right situation, may make the difference between success and failure. I would love to see that chapter expanded into a book of its own.

Fun and practical submitted by gardenfaerie on August 4, 2017, 5:16am Grammar Girl is great. I'm a word nerd and professional writer and editor, and still brush up on a few things on her blog. This book was very useful. She always has fun examples and explains grammar in a way that makes sense and is easy to remember.