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Introduction: Embrace grammar as powerful and purposeful.
Part One. WORDS
1. Read dictionaries for fun and learning.
2. Avoid speed bumps caused by misspellings.
3. Adopt a favorite letter of the alphabet.
4. Honor the smallest distinctions—even between a and the .
5. Consult a thesaurus to remind yourself of words you already know.
6. Take a class on how to cross-dress the parts of speech.
7. Enjoy, rather than fear, words that sound alike.
8. Learn seven ways to invent words.
9. Become your own lexicographer.
10. Take advantage of the short-word economy of English.
11. Learn when and how to enrich your prose with foreign words.
Part Two. POINTS
12. Use the period to determine emphasis and space.
13. Advocate use of the serial comma.
14. Use the semicolon as a “swinging gate.”
15. Embrace the three amigos: colon, dash, and parentheses.
16. Let your ear help govern the possessive apostrophe.
17. Take advantage of the versatility of quotation marks.
18. Use the question mark to generate reader curiosity and narrative energy.
19. Reclaim the exclamation point.
20. Master the elliptical art of leaving things out.
21. Reach into the “upper case” to unleash the power of names.
22. Vary your use of punctuation to create special effects.
Part Three. STANDARDS
23. Learn to lie or lay, as well as the principles behind the distinction.
24. Avoid the “trap” of subject-verb disagreement.
25. Render gender equality with a smooth style.
26. Place modifiers where they belong.
27. Help the reader learn what is “essential” and “nonessential.”
28. Avoid case mistakes and “hypergrammar.”
29. Be certain about the uncertain subjunctive and other “moody” subjects.
30. Identify all sources of ambiguity and confusion.
31. Show what is literal and what is figurative.
Part Four. MEANING
32. Join subjects and verbs, or separate them for effect.
33. Use active and passive verbs in combination—and with a purpose.
34. Befriend the lively verb to be .
35. Switch tenses, but only for strategic reasons.
36. Politely ignore the language crotchets of others.
37. Learn the five forms of well-crafted sentences.
38. Make sentence fragments work for you and the reader.
39. Use the complex sentence to connect unequal ideas.
40. Learn how expert writers break the rules in run-on sentences.
Part Five. PURPOSE
41. Master the uses of nonstandard English.
42. Add a pinch of dialect for flavor.
43. Tame taboo language to suit your purposes.
44. Unleash your associative imagination.
45. Play with sounds, natural and literary.
46. Master the distinction between denotation and connotation.
47. Measure the distance between concrete and abstract language.
48. Harness the power of particularity.
49. Have fun with initials and acronyms, but avoid “capital” offenses.
50. Master the grammar of new forms of writing.
Afterword: Live a life of language.
Appendix A: Words I have misspelled
Appendix B: Words I have confused
Appendix C: The Glamour of Grammar quick list
Acknowledgments
About the Author
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