Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
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- ISBN13: 9780805088311
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Online sensation Grammar Girl makes grammar fun and simple in this New York Times bestseller
Are you perplexed by split infinitives? Terrified of using “who” when a “whom” is called for? Do you avoid the words “affect” and “effect” altogether?
Grammar Girl is here to help!
Mignon Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, is determined to wipe out terrible grammar—but she’s also determined to make the process as painless as possible. A couple of years ago, she made a weekly podcast to tackle some of the most common mistakes people make while communicating. The podcasts have now been downloaded more than twenty million times, and Mignon has dispensed grammar tips on Oprah and appeared on the pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.
Written with the wit, warmth, and accessibility that the podcasts are known for, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing covers the grammar rules and word-choice guidelines that can confound even the best writers. From “between vs. among” and “although vs. while” to comma splices and misplaced modifiers, Mignon offers memory tricks and clear explanations that will help readers recall and apply persons troublesome grammar rules. Chock-full of tips on style, business writing, and effective e-mailing, Grammar Girl’s print debut deserves a spot on every communicator’s desk.
Mignon Fogarty is the creator of Grammar Girl and founder of the Quick and Dirty Tips Network. A technical writer and entrepreneur, she has served as an editor and producer at a number of health and science Web sites. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Washington in Seattle and an M.S. in biology from Stanford University. She lives in Reno, Nevada.
In 2007, Mignon Fogarty, perhaps better known as Grammar Girl, made a weekly podcast to tackle some of the most common mistakes people make while communicating. Her concise lessons aim to teach, or refresh, grammar knowledge as simply as possible. The podcasts have now been downloaded more than seven million times, and Fogarty has dispensed grammar tips on Oprah and appeared on the pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.
Written with the wit, warmth, and accessibility for which the podcasts are known, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing covers the grammar rules and word-choice guidelines that can confound even the best writers. Her tips include stylistic choices, business writing, and effective e-mailing. From “between vs. among” and “although vs. while” to comma splices and misplaced modifiers, Fogarty offers memory tricks and clear explanations that will help readers recall and apply persons troublesome grammar rules.
Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing is also available on CD as an unabridged audiobook, read by the leader. Please email literary@macmillan.com for more information.
Mignon Fogarty, perhaps better known as Grammar Girl, has compiled her concise lessons aimed to teach, or refresh, grammar knowledge as simply as possible. Written with the wit, warmth, and accessibility for which her weekly online podcasts are known, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing covers the grammar rules and word-choice guidelines that can confound even the best writers. Her tips include stylistic choices, business writing, and effective e-mailing.
“My mom is a language arts teacher at a lockdown facility for middle school and high school girls who have committed felonies. These are some really disturbed young ladies who have had really dreadful lives. One of my mom’s goals is to break them out of their habits of language ’street’ all the time, and especially to never write in slang. Her point is not to belittle colloquial speech but to impress upon these girls that there’s a time and place for everything and if they want to make it, they will need to learn to prompt themselves in an educated manner . . . For her birthday I gave mom your book and she likes it! It’s now part of her curriculum. She says these girls are amazed that a name can become a celebrity via excellent grammar and if she says, ‘Grammar Girl says . . . ” they sit up and listen. She says your thoughts for remembering grammar rules are terrific for these girls.”—Karen Roth, Scottsdale, Arizona
“Your book is fantastic. It reminds me of when I first read Strunk and White. I will use it in my classroom.”—Fourth Grade Teacher, Las Vegas Public School System
“I am a special education teacher and this year I have a cluster of kids in a self contained language arts class. It is my goal to make them decent writers. Most don’t know a noun from ketchup so using your memory tricks will help!”—Samantha Jenses, Phoenix Public School System (Middle School)
“I went into my high school senior son’s English class for a talks. What’s on the wall? The Grammar Girl article, laminated, from the Atlanta Journal Constitution.”—Barbara Nixon, Atlanta, Georgia
“While Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing is right to its title, offering advice for writers for every step of the process, from generating topic thoughts to effective proofreading tips, this is not merely a reference book for writers. Most of the information applies equally to our daily conversation, concisely clarifying routine language-related issues and tackling persons small bits of linguistic friction that rub us the incorrect way, or perhaps should rub us the incorrect way. Language is an interactive art, and Fogarty’s might is her simple engagement: Her explanations sound like the urgings of a kind coworker who wants you to stop sabotaging your career by using ‘then’ when you mean ‘than’, the gentle guidance of a friend who understands the intricacies of where the comma goes in relation to quotation inscription and parentheses. Her tone is simple and informative, which will be a relief to anyone who associates ‘proper English’ with condescending know-it-alls who reflect that knowledge of ‘whom’ separates the learned from the layperson. Best of all, she writes with enthusiasm, sometimes sounding like she
Amazon.com Review
Are you a fool for mnemonics? If so, you’ll fall head over nubucks for Mignon Fogarty–a.k.a. the Grammar Girl–and her handy new audio guide to writing and language well. It’s chock-full of smart small anecdotes and memory tricks for felling the most common grammatical foes (who can ever remember the difference between “nauseous” and “nauseated” anyway?) and at just an hour long it’s the perfect turn-to resource for students and professionals alike. I didn’t try too hard to stump Grammar Girl in our Q&A, but with her eagle eyes she spotted my grammatical (typographical?) misstep lacking missing a beat! –Anne Bartholomew
Questions for the Grammar Girl
Amazon.com: Now that we communicate so regularly via e-mail and text messaging, do you reflect that people have become more desensitized to poor grammar, or in your experience is awareness more heightened as a result?
Grammar Girl: The average person seems to have become more desensitized to poor grammar, but language lovers seem to be tormented by the flood of mutilated e-mail and text messages—at least a lot of the people I hear from seem to be tormented. It might be a self-selecting group. To use one of my father’s favorite phrases, language lovers seem to feel as though they are “being pecked to death by a duck.”
Amazon.com: Your weekly podcast helps millions of listeners use excellent grammar and write more effectively. Do you reflect there is more value in learning by listening, as compared to reading and practical exercise?
Grammar Girl: Perhaps it’s ironic, but I have a hard time learning by just listening. I need to read things, which is one of the reasons why I provide full transcripts for all my audio podcasts on the Grammar Girl Web site. People learn in different ways, so persons who want to listen can listen, and persons who want to read can read.
In my experience, nothing beats practical exercise. I regularly have to look up grammar rules over and over again because I can’t remember them, but once I’ve written a show about a rule, I permanently remember it.Amazon.com: Have the grammar mnemonics you’ve developed come easily to you? Which ones were the toughest to capture in an simple-to-remember tip?
Grammar Girl: Some mnemonics come easily and some don’t. I had a hard time coming up with a way for people to remember the difference between “its” and “it’s,” and I finished up using a really intricate tale about a dream I had involving the eBay “it” publicity battle.
I reflect the best mnemonics are the simple ones. Remembering that you should say “different from” as a replacement for of “different than” because “different” has two f’s and “from” starts with an f isn’t dreadfully creative, but it’s simple to remember.Amazon.com: Is there a grammar rule that even Grammar Girl finds it hard to remember?
Grammar Girl: There are so many that it’s hard to pick just one! I have a notoriously terrible memory, which is why I’m permanently building up mnemonics.
Regularly I find that when I can’t remember something it’s because it is a style issue as a replacement for of a hard-and-quick rule, so different people do it differently and there is no “right” answer. For example, I permanently have to look up the rules about whether the verb should be singular or plural after collective nouns like “team” and phrases like “the couple” and “one of the people who.”
But when I look up the rule for collective nouns, I am reminded that the “rule” is that you have to just choose whether your collective noun has a sense of being a group or a sense of being many individuals. (And then there are also differences between British and American English.)
It’s even worse with a axiom like “one of the people who”: experts are split over whether the verb should be singular or plural. There really isn’t an answer; you just have to pick a side. I have a hard time building a mnemonic for something like that!
Amazon.com: It used to be that proper grammar and thoughtful wording were the defining factors of a excellent piece of writing. Increasingly, but, writing is prized for the speed with which it is produced and not automatically the craft. How can conscientious writers find the pleased medium between form and efficiency?
Grammar Girl: What, didn’t I answer your questions quick enough?
But seriously, I don’t reflect I’ve come in contact with the people who value speed. As a Web editor, I certainly wasn’t pleased when people turned in terrible writing, even if they turned it in early. And when I was writing magazine articles or corporate materials for a living I never felt rushed (except when I waited too long to get ongoing).
The places where I do feel a sense of urgency are in e-mail and messaging; people seem to expect immediate responses. But writing a high-quality message doesn’t take much more time than writing a careless message; it just takes more focus.
Amazon.com: Bonus question: I wrote all these questions with no more than a cursory grammar and spelling check. How did I do?
Grammar Girl: I establish only one major error, and I changed the text to bold. It looked like a typo rather than an error in your understanding of the rules. Excellent job!
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I saw all the fantastic reviews on this book and thought this book must be top-notch. Sorry to say, it’s just meh.
Mignon (who happens to have one of the worst leader names I’ve ever heard) certainly knows her theme. That being said, she’s not much of a teacher. Just throwing out the grammar tips isn’t enough. Periodically, she gives out her weird memorization techniques, like associating “whoosssh” with “passed” rather than “past” -if this doesn’t work for you, you’re not alone.
This wouldn’t be so terrible if she at least offered some exercises to practice, or even some summaries to help you recall the things you just read. Sorry to say, you’d just have to read the book over and over to memorize it and really learn from it.
Sorry, this book just isn’t what you need when you want to practice your grammar skills.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Now that we’re in the twenty-first century, we can replace Strunk & White”s handbook with Grammar Girl’s Tips.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Reflect you can’t have fun reading about grammar? Really, you can, as long as you’re reading Grammar Girl. I’m a structure-lover myself, and grammar’s permanently been a agreed – part of the furniture, you might say. But I just finished reading Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, and I’ve got to say that for the first time, I really read a grammar book straight through and loved it!
First, Mignon Fogarty, “Grammar Girl,” has a fantastic style that makes her simple to read. Second, she answers a lot of persons murky questions we all have about grammar (or at least I regularly do!), and demystifies the rules. Some of my favorite parts of her book are the small notes she gives about the difference between American and British usage, a topic that so regularly confuses people. And I like how she smashes grammar myths, like the ancient English-teacher fiction that you can’t start a sentence with the word “and.” So if you’re looking for a fantastic reference guide, I recommend Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips.
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Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
These days, with the rise of regressive equipment, e.g. text messaging (sorry, but you could have saved us both five minutes if you simply called me to say ‘Wat R U doin?’), and the rise of incessant sound-bite marketing (sorry, Ronald; I like the fries but I’m so not ‘Lovin’ it’), Grammar Girl is just the super heroine we need to save the daily lexicon. Mignon Fogarty’s tips are not only quick and dirty, they’re also smart and odd. Buy it; study it; LOVE IT.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
As an ESL (English as a Second Language) tutor in a school district that has no curriculum in place and has no available resources for me to use, I have to find my own. This book is incredible! My students in middle school and high school are learning so much from this book. It is fantastic and I plot to use it daily, through the end of the school year. So many things are clarified simply and understandably in this small gem. If I had the income, I would buy one of these for each of my students. Thank you Grammar Girl. I’m going to let my spouse, who teaches a college writing class, glance through this and I hope that I can get it back after he’s had a peek. I’m guessing that I’ll have to buy another copy for him.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5