Grammar Gremlins

A great book idea, a poor authority, poorly organized. One should prefer waterboarding to this book. There is some accuracy and design in the book which recommends against capital punishment, but much rehabilitation need be forced upon the author before he is allowed to suffer the public further. I sentence the author to three to five years of hard revision.

I think this book should be on every professional's desk. I probably recommend it to my seminar attendees more than any other book.

The book is divided into the following sections:

-Punctuation, Mechanics, and Spelling
-Grammar
-Usage
-Pronunciation and Misused Words
-Vogue Words and Terms
-Who Tells Us What To Say and How To Say It?

As you can tell, from the section titles, this book helps with your writing and speaking. The book also shows how things change over time. For example, datum used to be singular for data and data was plural. Now the word data is used to represent both the singular and the plural.

I love the author's explanation of which versus that. Should I say, "It was the dog that lives next door." or "It was the dog which lives next door."? The technically correct answer: that. However, something like the following would be incorrect:

The food, that consisted of table scraps, was given to the dog.

Instead it should be:

The food, which consisted of table scraps, was given to the dog.

This is because the inserted statement - the one separated by commas - is non-essential information. It is traditional that "that" is used to introduce essential information.

I love this book and think you will to. I read it again every two years. This keeps me in grammatical shape - at least as good as can be expected for a West Virginian like myself (smile).

I hope this information helps you make your decision more easily.

Tom Carpenter

Ever wonder what is the correct way to say or write our own language? Well, this guy has put all of our most commom mistakes in one place. I get so aggravated when I hear such lazy grammar usage. But now I have an easy reference to know what is correct and what is not. I also found several I was in question about for myself, and now I know what I have been doing wrong. Want to know the "REAL" and correct usages for "I" and "me" in a sentence? This book spells-it-out.