Description
Book SynopsisWriting 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.
Trade Review“Finally, a book designed the way I teach. It doesn’t need to be taught page by page or chapter by chapter. You use what you need when you need it. Robert M. Martin uses clear examples to make points with a light conversational style and, at times, a hint of satire. Readers are not just given rules; they are given full explanations about how those rules have changed and are changing. That level of detail is unique. After all, sometimes you just need to know the rule; but sometimes you also need to know why.” — Kirk Layton, Mount Royal University
“Informative, refreshingly honest, and often genuinely humorous, Martin’s Writing Wrongs is a comprehensive guide to writing that will serve teachers and students of composition well. While Martin’s book covers many standard topics featured in most textbooks on this subject (grammar, the writing process, documentation), its strength derives from its focus on the less-discussed and trickier issue of the style of good prose, and from its open acknowledgement that ‘the rules’ of good writing are contingent on context and the subject of constant, ongoing negotiation. Eschewing dogma and embracing a conversational tone, Writing Wrongs manages to entertain while teaching its readers the ins and outs of a skill set with which many students—especially early-career undergraduates—routinely struggle.” — Morgan Rooney, Carleton University
Table of 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
