Full Description
Writing Wrongs is a concise and thoughtful guide to common errors in English. It covers frequently confused and misused words along with problems of grammar, punctuation, and style, and offers a brief and up-to-date guide to major citation styles. Though it provides guidelines and recommendations for usage, Writing Wrongs acknowledges the evolution of language over time and the fact that different contexts have different rules—it is not narrowly prescriptive. A friendly, flexible, and easy-to-read reference, Writing Wrongs will be useful to students and general readers alike.
Contents
Foreword
Part I: Wait! Stop! Make Sure You Read This!
How to Use This Book
Part II: How And Why
What's going on?
Why?
What Makes for Acceptability?
Sticklers
A Surprising Note on Rules
One Last Word
Part III: Words
Meanings, Uses, and Idioms: a Dictionary
Singular and Plural
Plurals not Made With -S
Singular or Plural?
Words Borrowed from Other Languages
Compound Terms
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Mass Nouns and Count Nouns
Irregular Verbs
Homophones or Nearly
Mondegreens and Eggcorns
Pronunciations and Mis-
Annoying Speech Mannerisms
Part IV: Grammar
Verb Forms
The Continuous Tenses
The Perfect Tenses
The Subjunctive
Sequence of Tenses in Indirect Speech
Active and Passive Voice
Subject-Verb Agreement
Collective Nouns
Other Agreement Problems
Split Infinitives
Like vs. As.
The Order of Adjectives
Danglers and Misplacements
The Supposedly Dangling Infinitive
Gerunds and the Possessive Case
Ending Sentences with Prepositions
The Cases of Pronouns
Sentences and Fragments
Beginning Sentences with conjunctions
Run-on Sentences
Punctuation
The Exclamation Mark !
The Semi-Colon ;
The Colon :
The Hyphen -
The Dashes -, —
Parentheses ( )
Square Brackets [ ]
The Apostrophe '
Quotation Marks "
The Ellipsis ...
Italics
Publications
Other Uses for Italics
Capitalization
Numerals
Part V: Style
Redundancy
Filler
Overblown Language
How to Use a Thesaurus
Biased or Insulting Language
Worries and Motives
A Rough Guide to Objectionable Language
Replacement
Other Problems
The Workaround
Euphemisms
Your Words
Jargon, Good and Evil
Good Jargon
Evil Jargon
Excessive Abstraction
Metaphors And Similes
Mixed Metaphors
Parallel Constructions
Part VI: Overall Form; The Writing Process
Short and Long Sentences
Greening
Planning Overall Structure
Overall Organization
Signposting
Paragraphing
Footnotes
Quoting and Citing Authorities
When to Footnote
Plagiarism
Part VII: Source Material And Citation
How to Insert Source Material
Summarizing and Paraphrasing
Quoting Directly
Signal Phrases
MLA Style
About In-Text Citations
About Works Cited
Chicago Style
About Chicago Style
APA Style
About In-Text Citations
About References
