Table of Contents
1 Surviving the Language Wars 1
2 The Big Picture 10
You Talkin' to Me? Speaking, Reading, and Writing 10
Audience Awareness, or. Baiting the Hook 21
Plain and Simple 26
Hitting the Right Note 31
Abstract Versus Concrete 36
3 Nuts and Bolts 40
Nouns and Pronouns 40
Adjectives and Adverbs 52
Verbs 58
Building Sentences 68
Paragraphs, Sections, and Chapters 78
4 Punctuation and Symbols 81
The Period 83
The Question Mark 83
The Exclamation Point 85
The Ellipsis 88
The Comma 89
The Colon 93
The Semicolon 94
The Dash 96
The Hyphen 98
The Apostrophe 102
Brackets and Their Friends 105
Quotation Marks 112
The Slash 119
Bullet Points 120
The Hashtag 120
The Ampersand 121
The Smiley and Other Emoticons 121
5 Sentence Surgery: The Writer as Editor 124
Pomposo Furioso 128
The Academic Repeater 131
The Confuser 133
The Monster 136
The Interrupter 141
6 Bells and Whistles: Bringing Things to Life 144
Cadence 151
Using the Figures 161
7 Perils and Pitfalls 171
Contested Usages 171
Red Rag Words 187
Wrong Notes 195
8 Out into the World 199
Long-Form Structure 199
Letters 211
Writing for the Screen 225
Layout and Presentation 242
Forms of Address 247
Acknowledgments 253
Index 255
About the Author 264
