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Enjoy.

The Elements of Style: Originating as a classroom study aid prepared by Cornell English Professor William Strunk in 1918, this widely-used desk reference of English usage, form, and style continues to influence writers after a hundred years. If you want to master the basics, this is a good book to get started. Click here to get more details or buy.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves: First published in April of 2004, Eats, Shoots and Leaves stayed 25 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and by October of that year it had already sold one million copies. At a bit more than 200 pages including the bibliography, this little book describes the rules that govern the use of: apostrophe, comma, colon, semi-colon, dash, hyphen and period. Click here to get more details or buy.

The Dictionary of Concise Writing: A must have book for anyone who wants to write better. It brings over 10,000 alternatives you can use to free your text from wordy constructions and unnecessary phrases. Click here to get more details or buy.

Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus: Another book worth investing in, as you will be able to use it over and over again. It comes with synonyms, antonyms, sample sentences and cross references to let you pick the most precise word for each occasion. Click here to get more details or buy.

Concise Oxford English Dictionary: If you are looking for a solid dictionary and don’t want to spend a fortune on it, this is a good choice. The OED is considered by many the best English dictionary around. Click here to get more details or buy.

On Writing: One of the best books about writing and being a writer. Stephen King is probably the most popular horror writer ever, and in this book he shares how he started, the basic writing rules and the fiction writing process. Click here to get more details or buy.

The Screenwriter’s Bible: If want to start writing scripts, this book could help. David Trottier is a writer, producer and script consultant, and he shares tips on all the stages you will go through, from getting started to formatting and selling your script. Click here to get more details or buy.

Plot & Structure: This book is part of a series called “Write Great Fiction.” As the name implies, it will assist you while creating the plot for your stories. It comes with techniques, tips and even exercises you can use to practice what you will learn. Click here to get more details or buy.

Rules for Writers: A book aimed at college students (regardless of the course). Diane Hacker, the author, has been teaching at the Prince George’s Community College for over 35 years, and this book is the result of what she learned from her students over that time. Click here to get more details or buy.

On Writing Well: The subtitle says it all: “The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction.” The book covers many aspects of writing, from removing unnecessary words and phrases to identifying your audience and editing your pieces. Click here to get more details or buy.

The Associated Press Stylebook: One of the most popular style guides among professional writers and journalists. The 2009 edition has been revised and contains over 3,000 new entries. Click here to get more details or buy.

The three newcomers to my shelves are:

Penguin Dictionary of English Grammar by R. L. Trask, 2000.
As the title implies, this guide arranges topics and terms in alphabetical order. It includes every permutation of terminology from the traditional ones I grew up with to the innovations born of transformational grammar and Quirk Grammar. Here one can find definitions of subject raising, subjuncts, adjuncts and conjuncts, along with more immediately useful terms as double negative, paradigm, relative pronoun and usage. A lot of the terms are, however, a bit esoteric. While it’s a great resource for me in my line of work, there’s probably nothing here you can’t find online at OWL or any of the other free references mentioned in Online Style Guides.

Penguin Guide to Punctuation by R. L. Trask, 1997.
Trask does more than present rules and made-up textbook examples. His personality comes through as he discusses badly punctuated passages, often speculating as to why certain errors are made. It’s extremely readable, whatever page you open to. Of the ten chapters, seven deal with specific punctuation marks:

2: The Full Stop, the Question Mark and the Exclamation Mark
3: The Comma
4: The Colon and the Semicolon
5: The Apostrophe
6: The Hyphen and the Dash
7 Capital Letters and Abbreviations
8 Quotation Marks

Chapter 1 explains the practical importance of punctuation. Chapter 7 gives rules for capitalizing and abbreviating. Chapter 9 deals with typographical considerations and Chapter 10 discusses the punctuation of essays and letters.

I’m still in the process of getting acquainted with it, but this punctuation guide promises to be a treasure. Having British usage all in one place will be a great help as I write future posts.

Penguin Writer’s Manual by Martin H. Manser and Stephen Curtis, 2002.
As might be expected, there’s some overlap with the other two books. This one book has everything a writer needs in a basic reference.

Part One deals with the mechanics of writing:

1 Grammar
2 Usage
3 Vocabulary
4 Spelling
5 Punctuation
6 Abbreviations.

Part Two gets into the specifics of style, revision, and types of writing. There’s also a generous glossary of grammatical terms.

In case you’re wondering:
Quirk grammars: A series of grammars of English written by Randolph Quirk and his colleagues. Though rather traditional in orientation, these grammars are informed by contemporary linguistic research. They introduce a certain amount of novel terminology.

According to Noah Lukeman, plenty.

The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile analyzes the types of mistakes that appear in “99 percent” of the unsolicited manuscripts received by agents and editors.

His experience as a literary agent who has read thousands of manuscripts has led Lukeman to this conclusion:

From Texas to Oklahoma to California to England to Turkey to Japan, writers are doing the exact same things wrong.

The purpose of his book is to show writers how to be their own first readers. The First Five Pages

assumes that by scrutinizing a few pages closely enough–particularly the first few–you can make a determination for the whole. It assumes that if you find one line of extraneous dialogue on page 1, you will likely find one line of extraneous dialogue on each page to come.

Even before he gets to a discussion of such things as dialogue, characterization, and point of view, Lukeman emphasizes the importance of Presentation.

By Presentation he means such purely mechanical matters as paper, margins, and enclosing a stamped addressed envelope. No matter how great the artistic merit of a manuscript, careless packaging can keep it from taken seriously. Such inattention to detail, says Lukeman,

may signal carelessness, sloppiness, ignorance or defiance of the industry’s standards; that the writer doesn’t care enough to do the minimum amount of research to make a manuscript industry presentable. Often when a writer’s presentation is careless, his writing is too.

I especially like what Lukeman has to say about the importance of an extensive vocabulary in creating a clear, specific, distinctive style. He notes a dearth of vocabulary in the work of modern writers:

It is as if all of today’s writers were working from a high school-level vocabulary–and writers who do use unusual words more ofen than not misuse them

He encourages writers to enrich their vocabulary by learning not just a word’s current meaning, but its origin and history as well–not for mere erudition, but in order to fix the word in the writer’s mind and make it his own. This “extra” lore is what I call “iceberg information,” knowledge that floats below the surface of the writing, adding substance without show.

Barely 200 pages in length, Lukeman’s guide puts the writer in the mind of the agent, packing a lot of insight into a small space. The chapters are brief, but to the point, and each one is followed by writing exercises.

For the author who has a novel ready to market, The First Five Pages is a valuable tool for the final revision.

This little book has sold more than 10 million copies since 1959. Its publisher, Longman, has commemorated the anniversary by producing a black leather-bound, gold-embossed edtion containing paens to the work written by prominent literary and journalistic figures from Dorothy Parker to Dan Rather .

Dennis K. Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, goes so far as to equate teeny Elements with Fowler’s massive and erudite Modern Usage:

“This [Elements of Style], together with…H.W. Fowler’s ‘Dictionary of Modern English Usage,’ are the two style books that are generally held up as the authorities”

Unlike many writers, I was not introduced to Elements as an undergraduate. It was not until many years later that I found it–literally–in the drawer of a desk assigned to me in a college English department. Since I already relied on Walsh’s Plain English Handbook to solve knotty usage problems, I didn’t have much occasion to consult Strunk and White. However, all my colleagues had a copy and recommended it to their students. I never doubted that it was an impeccable reference.

Until now.

A caustic review of The Elements of Style in the April 17, 2009 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice,” has sent me back to Strunk and White for a closer look.

According to Professor Geoffrey K. Pullum, head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002),

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

Harsh words, but at least two of the items in Pullum’s criticism struck a chord with me: the entry on passive verbs, and the admonition against using adverbs.

I’ve often pondered the fact that many writers, not just students, but practicing adult writers, and even (gasp) English teachers, often identify verbs as “passive” that aren’t.

The explanation may well lie in the fact that White gives four examples of the passive, three of which are incorrect.

One of White’s incorrect examples of the passive,

There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground

brought 187,000 Google hits.

Here’s what I found by following one of the links. It’s from a teacher’s guidelines for writing lab reports:

Use the active voice (tense) [sic], not passive voice, when writing, it is much more direct and vigorous. For example, “Dead leaves covered the ground.” (Active voice) versus “There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground.” (Passive voice). I highly recommend the ‘little book’ entitled The elements of style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White, it costs about $7.

White’s admonition against adverbs may explain the almost religious aversion to using adverbs felt by so many writers and teachers of writers. Here’s a headline I saw over a writing post:

Fight back against beastly adverbs

Personally, I like adverbs–not Tom Swifties, of course–but adverbs have their place.

Pullum’s iconoclastic condemnation of The Elements of Style will perhaps anger the guide’s numerous worshippers, but it raises some valid criticisms.

I’m going back to Strunk and White with a critical eye this time, and may do a page by page analysis of my own.

50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice
Longman’s Special Edition of The Elements of Style
In Priaise of The Elements of Style on its 50th Anniversary
Maeve on Passive Voice

Today computers are used to organize, store, and supplement the online Second Edition of the OED at the rate of 4,000 new words a year. But the OED had its beginnings long before computers made the lexicographer’s work easier.

It took 120 keyboarders working six years to key in the more than 350,000,000 handset characters of the First Edition from which the Second Edition derives.

The First Edition, compiled and printed the old-fashioned way, required numerous editors, thousands of volunteer readers, millions of slips of paper, and 70 years to achieve completion.

But these are nothing but dry statistics. For a glimpse of the human side of the mighty OED, read Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman.

Subtitled A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Winchester’s book is an instructive example of narrative nonfiction as well as a fascinating read. It tells the story of James Murray (the professor) and W.C. Minor (the madman).

Murray took over the editorship of the OED in 1879 and remained at the job until his death in 1915. He guided the dictionary from A-T. Minor was a former American army doctor incarcerated from 1872-1910 in the Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane. He contributed thousands of the quotations that illustrate usage in the OED entries.

Minor killed an Englishman, but escaped execution by reason of insanity. Because of his personal wealth and usually mild behavior, he was given special privileges, such as having two rooms in a cell block with a pleasant view. He fitted one of the rooms as a library and collected old books.

When Professor Murray sent out a call in 1879 for volunteers to contribute illustrative quotations to the OED, Minor responded. He applied himself to a systematic reading regimen and earned Murray’s attention and respect.

Winchester’s embroideries and speculations are sometimes a little over the top. He waxes romantic as he commiserates with Minor’s victims and speculates on the possible causes of Minor’s mental condition. Overall, however, The Professor and the Madman is an excellent use of research to create a non-fiction book that is hard to put down. It casts a reference book we take for granted in a new light.