Comma Sense: A Fun-damental Guide to Punctuation

I have not finished reading the book, but from what I have read of it, it is well written and meets a great need.

Oh yeah, I went looking specifically for expertise in your area of skill and found you by careful search. I'm HAPPY about finding your book as it contains everything I need ... I expect perfection of myself. Imagine an Editor getting material from me with punctuation errors ... ugh! I believe, by using "Common Sense" I'll gain a little more power with my literature.
Many thanks,
Larry

This is the unique book that has you mentally tallying up your friend's birthdays before you get to the last chapter (lets see... I can buy it for Ken, and Susie, and my daughter so she won't dog-ear my copy...). I picked this up for an educationally boring read that would knock me out at bedtime and instead found myself staying up most of the night laughing. Comma Sense is the darndest, funniest, wittiest educational book I've ever read. You can't help but learn something... it sort of seeps into your brain while you're distracted with a mental picture of what the Andrew Sisters would look like if viewed from above (yes, of COURSE they would look like...well, read Chapter 13 and you'll find out). I would write more, but I have to rush out now and buy extra copies for everyone I know.

Not just another book on punctuation! What can Comma Sense: A Fundamental Guide To Punctuation hold over its many competitors? 'Fun' is the operative word here, as Richard Lederer and John Shore poke fun at the misuse of punctuation and how choices in punctuation can have very different results. Plenty of examples come couched in this humor, which makes Comma Sense quite easy to learn. Just consider that here the exclamation point is the 'titan of tingle, the prince of palpitation' and you have some idea of the allure of Comma Sense - and its potential of educating those who traditionally wouldn't touch grammar books with a ten-foot pole.

Written by a couple of English majors, for the fun of it, I just have to wonder why this little book would cost so much. They poke fun at punctuation, as we know it in America, which I am sure will thoroughly confuse those who speak other languages to wonder what on earth is going on! But, that's the fun of it!

This is all about writing, and writing is about expressing thoughts and feelings (also opinions). This instruction booklet will show you which punctuation mark to use to get your point across, and to be understood to your best potential. I was best at grammar in high school, went on to literature in college where I married my lit. (and speech) teacher [one and the same.] I thought I knew it all, as other college English teachers told me they had never heard me make a grammatical error. But, as with all the books I choose, I learned about the "ellipsis" which I have never used and reminded me of the brackets, which I am not sure I learned in the first place.

John Shore is the editor who loves to mark. I once typed into the computer a "Self Study" for a vocational school, and the English teacher on the committee told me she got out her red marker to circle all the errors, but in the sections I put together, she could find none to circle. That was the greatest compliment! Richard Lederer is the language expert, having written a humungous amount of books on English in all its forms: puns, words, games, verbal skills, and miracles of....

If you know English already, they will teach you when and how to use the apostrophe, colon, semicolon, comma, dash, exclamation point, hyphen, paragraph, parentheses, question mark, quotation mark, and the new ones, brackets and ellipsis. For instance, "within a quotation, use brackets to insert a missing or explanatory word or comment." "***Use an ellipsis to indicate the intentional omission of one or more words within a sentence." This might be confusing to non-English speakers, as both involved missing words. Where'd they go? Do the words exist and just have gotten lost, or did the writer intend not to use those words anyway?

They give a funny use of the hyphen, how the wrong placement at the end of a line can make completely different words. The best way to avoid that is to justify your typewritten work. It makes the margins level and nothing is hyphenated. From one English perfectionist to another, I wish the self-appointed grammar expert in the local newspaper could see this delightful book. He could learn a thing or two, maybe several, as he thinks differently from the way I was taught. By the way, he avoids me in public!