Torn Wings And Faux Pas

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, in this engaging, Gothic, quick-fix handbook--an ideal complement to The Deluxe Transitive Vampire--playfully instructs her readers about grammar and style as she plunges them into her magical world teeming with a wildly imaginative menagerie of winged and terrestrial creatures. Six eccentric fictional authorities, including sex-changing Natty Ampersand and Medievalist Vargas Scronx, give the book a sense of send-up in addition to its trusty practicality. A farouche faun with cloven hoofs, black rats, sirens and sphinxes, turbaned serpents, dragons, brigands and a butler make their appearance in unforgettable sentences and imaginary landscapes, such as brooding Trajikistan, to beguile the reader through such confusions and corrections as dangling and misplaced modifiers, double negatives, parallel construction, and a voluptuous riot of word abuses and preferable usage. Gordon also tames such confusing grammatical beasts as the elliptical clause, split infinitives, and many more. Rikki Ducornet has drawn more than fifty whimsical illustrations that capture the eccentric spirit of the text. Torn Wings and Faux Pas makes the reader laugh out loud and shiver with pleasure while experiencing style, vocabulary, and the structures of language as a perpetual and fiendish delight.

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, in this engaging, Gothic, quick-fix handbook--an ideal complement to The Deluxe Transitive Vampire--playfully instructs her readers about grammar and style as she plunges them into her magical world teeming with a wildly imaginative menagerie of winged and terrestrial creatures. Six eccentric fictional authorities, including sex-changing Natty Ampersand and Medievalist Vargas Scronx, give the book a sense of send-up in addition to its trusty practicality. A farouche faun with cloven hoofs, black rats, sirens and sphinxes, turbaned serpents, dragons, brigands and a butler make their appearance in unforgettable sentences and imaginary landscapes, such as brooding Trajikistan, to beguile the reader through such confusions and corrections as dangling and misplaced modifiers, double negatives, parallel construction, and a voluptuous riot of word abuses and preferable usage. Gordon also tames such confusing grammatical beasts as the elliptical clause, split infinitives, and many more. Rikki Ducornet has drawn more than fifty whimsical illustrations that capture the eccentric spirit of the text. Torn Wings and Faux Pas makes the reader laugh out loud and shiver with pleasure while experiencing style, vocabulary, and the structures of language as a perpetual and fiendish delight.

The basic rules governing the use of periods, semicolons, hyphens, commas, and other punctuation marks are illustrated by original explanations and humorous sample sentences. Reprint.

Playful and practical, this is the style book you can't wait to use, a guide that addresses classic questions of English usage with wit and the blackest of humor. Black-and-white illustrations throughout.

Uses imaginative examples to illustrate the meaning of words from abrogate, brouhaha, and cachinnate to susurration, truculence, and voluble.

Painstakingly researched with copious citations from books, newspapers, and news magazines, this new edition has become the classic reference work praised by professional copy editors.

Today’s writers need more spunk than Strunk: whether it's the Great American e-mail, Madison Avenue advertising, or Grammy Award-winning rap lyrics, memorable writing must jump off the page. Copy veteran Constance Hale is on a mission to make creative communication, both the lyrical and the unlawful, an option for everyone. With its crisp, witty tone, Sin and Syntax covers grammar’s ground rules while revealing countless unconventional syntax secrets (such as how to use—Gasp!—interjections or when to pepper your prose with slang) that make for sinfully good writing. Discover how to: *Distinguish between words that are “pearls” and words that are “potatoes” * Avoid “couch potato thinking” and “commitment phobia” when choosing verbs * Use literary devices such as onomatopoeia, alliteration, and metaphor (and understand what you're doing) Everyone needs to know how to write stylish prose—students, professionals, and seasoned writers alike. Whether you’re writing to sell, shock, or just sing, Sin and Syntax is the guide you need to improve your command of the English language.

The 3rd Edition of Literacy & Learning in the Content Areas helps readers build the knowledge, motivation, tools, and confidence they need as they integrate literacy into their middle and high school content area classrooms. Its unique approach to teaching content area literacy actively engages preservice and practicing teachers in reading and writing and the very activities that they will use to teach literacy to their own studentsin middle and high school classrooms . Rather than passively learning about strategies for incorporating content area literacy activities, readers get hands-on experience in such techniques as mapping/webbing, anticipation guides, booktalks, class websites, and journal writing and reflection. Readers also learn how to integrate children's and young adult literature, primary sources, biographies, essays, poetry, and online content, communities, and websites into their classrooms. Each chapter offers concrete teaching examples and practical suggestions to help make literacy relevant to students' content area learning. Author Sharon Kane demonstrates how relevant reading, writing, speaking, listening, and visual learning activities can improve learning in content area subjects and at the same time help readers meet national content knowledge standards and benchmarks.