The Best Grammar Workbook Ever! is a comprehensive instructional guide for ages 10-110. It covers grammar basics, common grammar problems, punctuation, capitalization, and word usage. In addition to a Pretest and Final Test, there are more than 100 practice exercises and tests at the end of each chapter. A complete list of answers is included in one of the appendixes. Other appendixes include commonly misspelled words, commonly mispronounced words, Greek and Latin word roots, and writing tips. The book is written in a friendly and easy-to-use tone. There are helpful hints throughout and a complete index.
O[Miller's] "Correct Me If I'm Wrong" puts English into plain English, which is no small feat! The book is terrific.ONScott James, "New York Times" columnist.
Arlene Miller uses her extensive experience and exuberant manner to assemble a surprisingly entertaining approach to our challenging language. I can't think of a neater, nor more useful, tool on your shortlist of references.--K. Patrick McDonald, author, consultant, speaker, and paramedic.
This book argues for a deeper, richer view of vocabulary than the standard images conjured up by that word--worksheets, weekly quizzes, and anxieties about standardized test scores. The book invites teachers and students to experience "the music of words," words in isolation and in juxtapositions, and urges them to bring their own life experiences to language, showing in turn how language can help them know that experience more fully. It demonstrates how to build a community in the classroom where curiosity about language is the norm. It states that, within this community, students and teacher not only take time to test out shades of connotation and learn about how words and syntax create voice, they also: engage in personal and philosophical discussions that grow from seemingly simple words such as "solitude,""self," and "phony"; participate in dance and theater games as ways of mastering language; keep individual word lists which they share with the class through a variety of exercises; free-associate through discussion and freewrites on key words from literature; write their own dictionary definitions of familiar words; experiment with the rhythms and sounds of words through poetry writing; and explore the different vocabularies used in a big city newspaper--in sportswriting, book and TV reviews, news reporting, editorials, and science writing. (Each chapter contains notes, and a 17-item annotated bibliography of books for further reading is attached.) (NKA)
Master verbalist Richard Lederer, America's "Wizard of Idiom" (Denver Post), presents a love letter to the most glorious of human achievements... Welcome to Richard Lederer's beguiling celebration of language -- of our ability to utter, write, and receive words. No purists need stop here. Mr. Lederer is no linguistic sheriff organizing posses to hunt down and string up language offenders. Instead, join him "In Praise of English," and discover why the tongue described in Shakespeare's day as "of small reatch" has become the most widely spoken language in history: English never rejects a word because of race, creed, or national origin. Did you know that jukebox comes from Gullah and canoe from Haitian Creole? Many of our greatest writers have invented words and bequeathed new expressions to our eveyday conversations. Can you imagine making up almost ten percent of our written vocabulary? Scholars now know that William Shakespeare did just that! He also points out the pitfalls and pratfalls of English. If a man mans a station, what does a woman do? In the "The Department of Redundancy Department," "Is English Prejudiced?" and other essays, Richard Lederer urges us not to abandon that which makes us human: the capacity to distinguish, discriminate, compare, and evaluate.
"This is the colorful and dramatic biography of two of America's most controversial entrepreneurs: Moses Louis Annenberg, 'the racing wire king, ' who built his fortune in racketeering, invested it in publishing, and lost much of it in the biggest tax evasion case in United States history; and his son, Walter, launcher of TV Guide and Seventeen magazines and former ambassador to Great Britain."--Jacket.
In 2010 the first edition of The Best Little Grammar Book Ever! was published. Readers, including many schools and colleges, have loved it. Why a second edition? Grammar standards do evolve and change over time, so a few things have changed in the past several years. The second part of this series will be a "little" workbook that can be used with this book (and either book can be used alone). The Best Little Grammar Book Ever! contains an introduction to grammar (parts of speech, phrases, clauses), common grammar issues, punctuation, capitalization, word usage, a writing lesson, a final test, a complete index, and much more.--Page [4] of cover.
Why do commas have so many rules? Does the period go before or after the quotation mark? How do I use an ellipsis? Is a semicolon much different from a colon? Find out the answers to these and all your other punctuation questions in To Comma or Not to Comma, the latest grammar book from Arlene Miller, The Grammar Diva.
The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.
