The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English (1/2)

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Little, Brown and Company. 2010. — 152 pages. ISBN: 978-0-316-08906-7. MP3 / 64 kb/s / stereoАнглийская грамматика в занимательной форме, написанная и начитанная автором бестселлера Writing Tools. В данном файле книга.Roy Peter Clark is one of the most influential writing teachers in the U.S. His book, Writing Tools, has 65,000 copies in print and his podcasts have been downloaded from iTunes over 1 million times. Now he's returning to the roots of the English language with The Glamour of Grammar. This is an enchanting and entertaining approach to essential grammar.Early in the history of English, the words "grammar" and "glamour" meant the same thing: the power to charm. Roy Peter Clark, author of Writing Tools, aims to put the glamour back in grammar with this fun, engaging alternative to stuffy instructionals.In this practical guide, listeners will learn everything from the different parts of speech to why effective writers prefer concrete nouns and active verbs. The Glamour of Grammar gives listeners all the tools they need to "live inside the language"-to take advantage of grammar to perfect their use of English, to instill meaning, and to charm through their writing. With this indispensable audio book, listeners will come to see just how glamorous grammar can be.ContentsWordsRead dictionaries for fun and learning.Avoid speed bumps caused by misspellings.Adopt a favorite letter of the alphabet.Honor the smallest distinctions—even betweena and the.Consult a thesaurus to remind yourself of words you already know.Take a class on how to cross-dress the parts of speech.Enjoy, rather than fear, words that sound alike.Learn seven ways to invent words.Become your own lexicographer.Take advantage of the short-word economy of English.Learn when and how to enrich your prose with foreign words.PointsUse the period to determine emphasis and space.Advocate use of the serial comma.Use the semicolon as a swinging gate.Embrace the three amigos: colon, dash, and parentheses.Let your ear help govern the possessive apostrophe.Take advantage of the versatility of quotation marks.Use the question mark to generate reader curiosity and narrative energy.Reclaim the exclamation point.Master the elliptical art of leaving things out.Reach into the upper case to unleash the power of names.Vary your use of punctuation to create special effects.StandardsLearn to lie or lay, as well as the principles behind the distinction.Avoid the trap of subject-verb disagreement.Render gender equality with a smooth style.Place modifiers where they belong.Help the reader learn what is essential and nonessential.Avoid case mistakes and hypergrammar.Be certain about the uncertain subjunctive and other moody subjects.Identify all sources of ambiguity and confusion.Show what is literal and what is figurative.MeaningJoin subjects and verbs, or separate them for effect.Use active and passive verbs in combination—and with a purpose.Befriend the lively verb to be.Switch tenses, but only for strategic reasons.Politely ignore the language crotchets of others.Learn the five forms of well-crafted sentences.Make sentence fragments work for you and the reader.Use the complex sentence to connect unequal ideas.Learn how expert writers break the rules in run-on sentences.PurposeMaster the uses of nonstandard English.Add a pinch of dialect for flavor.Tame taboo language to suit your purposes.Unleash your associative imagination.Play with sounds, natural and literary.Master the distinction between denotation and connotation.Measure the distance between concrete and abstract language.Harness the power of particularity.Have fun with initials and acronyms, but avoid capital offenses.Master the grammar of new forms of writing.