Table of Contents
Grammar Table Road Trips xi
Introduction: A Table Unfolded xiii
1 A National Obsession: The Oxford Comma 1
2 The Joy of Grammar Vocabulary 15
3 "Affect" and "Effect" Are Mean Spelling Trolls 23
4 Corrections, Humility, and Etiquette 30
5 Adverbial Antics 36
6 How Are You? 42
7 Bookzuberance 48
8 Going Farther and Further 53
9 Texting Grammar 58
10 Sentimental Speller 63
11 Please _ (Lie, Lay) Down and Read This 81
12 The Life, Times, and Punctuation of the Appositive 93
13 Weird Plurals: Your Data _ (Is/Are) Giving Me a Headache 100
14 Yes, Ma'am! 106
15 Accents Keep Things Fresh 109
16 The Great American Spacing War 114
17 Capitalization Chaos 121
18 Contract with Confidence! 128
19 The Pleasure of Pronunciation 131
20 I Saw _ (a, an) UFO on Main Street 144
21 Compound Sentences 148
22 Semicolonphobia! 159
23 Labyrinthine Lists 166
24 Colonoscopy 173
25 Comma Volume 176
26 You Can Read This Chapter in Five Minutes or Fewer 184
27 Possessed by Apostrophes 188
28 Plural Possessive Holiday Extravaganza 202
29 Peculiar Pasts 207
30 Peripatetic Past Participles 211
31 What's Passed Is Past 220
32 Gerund v. Present-Participle Smackdown 225
33 Horizontal-Line Lessons - Hyphens and Dashes, A-Z 233
34 Good Fun with Bad Words 244
35 … 247
36 Where's That Preposition At? 252
37 Faces and Facets of "They" 262
38 The Precarious Case of the Pronoun Case 271
39 Whom Ya Gonna Call? 283
40 Bewitching Whiches 292
41 Punctuation Location Contemplation 298
42 Subject-Verb Synchronicity 309
43 More Than Then 322
44 It's Time for "Its"! 326
45 More Homophonous Happenings: "Your" and "Their" 331
46 Had Had, That That, Do Do, Do Be Do! 337
47 The Art of Writing with Your Actual Hand 343
48 School Days 350
49 Grammar Boogie 357
Acknowledgments 361
Tabletop Bibliography: What's on the Grammar Table? 362
Index 365