Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English » (Updated & Expanded)

A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses and Dissertations, from the editors of The Chicago Manual of Style, includes detailed samples of the correct form for papers, whether they're short reports or detailed dissertations.

A witty and therefore easy-to-read look at the rules of grammar. This is truly a fun book to read, which is pretty astounding, given its subject.

Daniel Pinkwater

Lighthearted and funny...It's like Strunk and White combined with S.J. Perelman. —The New York Times Book Review

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Woe Is I: Therapy for Pronoun Anxiety 1

2 Plurals Before Swine: Blunders with Numbers 19

3 Yours Truly: The Possessives and the Possessed 37

4 They Beg to Disagree: Putting Verbs in Their Place 49

5 Verbal Abuse: Words on the Endangered List 81

6 Comma Sutra: The Joy of Punctuation 133

7 The Compleat Dangler: A Fish out of Water 159

8 Death Sentence: Do Cliches Deserve to Die? 167

9 The Living Dead: Let Bygone Rules Be Gone 181

10 Saying Is Believing: How to Write What You Mean 195

11 E-Mail Intuition: Does Anything Go? 205

Glossary 219

Bibliography 231

Index 233