The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and StyleThis authoritative survey of English usage, grammar, and style offers guidance on almost any writing problem imaginable. Arranged in a single, easy-to-use A-Z list, the guide's 1,500 entries include examples and quotations that show not only correct and incorrect usage but also the relative effectiveness of different expressions in context. The guide also presents the opinions of the American Heritage(R) Usage Panel--a group of two hundred prominent writers, scholars, and scientists--who are polled on traditional and emerging usage problems. The panel makes clear when attitudes about a word are changing, when old chestnuts have been laid to rest, and when today's innovations are likely to become tomorrow's standards. This book confronts traditional bugbears, such as disinterested and lay vs. lie, along with a variety of new challenges, such as seeking closure and begging the question. Commonly confused words, such as impinge and infringe, are teased apart. Notes on science terms explain the difference between popular and technical uses of words like relativity and exponential growth. Rulings are given for tough calls on grammatical controversies, redundancy, and parallelism, and sensible guidance is provided on punctuation, capitalization, and other conventions of style. Both readable and well researched, this book is an eminently sensible source of advice on how to use words effectively. |
Common terms and phrases
accepted the sentence adjective adverb American English auxiliary auxiliary verb avoid British English capitalized century clause color comma common commonly compound confused conjunction considered constructions contexts count nouns critics derived describe dictionaries distinction English words especially example expression fact formal writing French grammatical Greek hyphenated independent clause indicate infinitive intransitive J.R.R. Tolkien language Latin less lowercase Middle English modify Native Native American negative noun phrase object offensive Old English original Panel rejected Panelists passive voice past participle past tense percent accepted percent rejected person plural noun plural verb possessive prefix prepositional phrase primary verbs pronounced pronunciation quotation redundancy refer rhyming second syllable sense similar simply singular verb sometimes sound speakers speech spelling spelling pronunciation standard stress subject and verb subjunctive suffix survey synonym tence term thing tion traditional rule transitive Usage Panel accepted usually variant verb agreement vowel writers