CONTENTS
1 Surviving the Language Wars
2 The Big Picture
You Talkin’ to Me?: Speaking, Reading and Writing
Audience-Awareness, Or, Baiting the Hook
Plain and Simple
Hitting the Right Note
Abstract Versus Concrete
3 Nuts and Bolts
Nouns and Pronouns
Adjectives and Adverbs
Verbs
Building Sentences
Paragraphs, Sections and Chapters
4 Widgets
The Full Stop, or Period
The Question Mark
The Exclamation Mark
The Ellipsis
The Comma
The Colon
The Semicolon
The Dash
The Hyphen
The Apostrophe
Brackets and their Friends
Quotation Marks and Inverted Commas
The Oblique or Slash
Bullet Points
The Hashtag
The Ampersand
The Smiley and other Emoticons
5 Sentence Surgery: the Writer as Editor
Pomposo Furioso
The Academic Repeater
The Confuser
The Monster
The Interrupter
6 Bells and Whistles: Bringing Things to Life
Cadence
Using the Figures
7 Perils and Pitfalls
Contested Usages
Red Rag Words
Wrong Notes
8 Out into the World
Long-Form Structure
Letters
Writing for the Screen
Layout and Presentation
Appendix: Forms of Address
Acknowledgements
Index