Reviews for: The Best Little Grammar Book Ever!: Speak and Write with Confidence / Avoid Common Mistakes 2nd Edition, by Arlene Miller. Joel Friedlander reviews The Best Little Grammar Book Ever! In this delightful book, Arlene Miller demystifies the basics of grammar to help you communicate with more clarity. And she does it without talking down to the reader, and without boring you to tears. This is not a compendium of grammar practice; it’s a streamlined overview with lots of tips and hints that will have you writing better right away. Joel Friedlander is an award-winning book designer, a blogger, the author of A Self-Publisher’s Companion: Expert Advice for Authors Who Want to Publish and The Self-Publisher’s Ultimate Resource Guide. He’s been launching the careers of self-publishers since 1994 and writes TheBookDesigner.com, a popular blog on book design, book marketing and the future of the book. Sheri Graves reviews The Best Little Grammar Book Ever!…
Tag: Arlene Miller
What about “They?” Arlene Miller answers.
Guest Blogger Arlene Miller, The Grammar Diva, gives us a sneak preview into her recently published second edition of The Best Little Grammar Book Ever! If you are a member of the nerdy world of grammarians, you know that there are “controversial” grammar topics. One of those is the use of the Oxford comma. Another is the use of the singular they. I use the Oxford comma, and I don’t use the singular they. But both these issues are up to you. Let’s talk about the singular they. They is a pronoun. A pronoun is a word that stands in for a noun. We know that they is third person plural. Third person singular pronouns are he, she, and it. Now how many times have you said, or heard someone say, Everyone is bringing their book to the meeting or something similar? Let’s pick that sentence apart: This is an issue of…
Fifty Shades of Grammar by Arlene Miller
Fifty Shades of Grammar: Scintillating and Saucy Sentences, Syntax, and Semantics from The Grammar Diva, Reviewed by Sheri Graves The Grammar Diva has done it again! Arlene Miller’s Fifty Shades of Grammar is one of the most easy to understand of all grammar books ever published. Subtitled, “Scintillating and Saucy Sentences, Syntax and Semantics from the Grammar Diva,” this book may be Miller’s crowning achievement, yet it certainly is not her last book on the subject. Fifty Shades of Grammar is Miller’s sixth book on grammar, and I suspect she’s working on a seventh even now. What Arlene Miller does in her books is simplify the rules. She gives advice on grammar problems that have confounded writers of the English language since, well, forever. And she does so in a way that makes sense. Take, for example, the problem of whether to use who or whom. Her advice: Substitute the…
Guest blogger Arlene Miller asks, “Should we dumb down the language?”
Guest Blogger Arlene Miller writes: I am a member of some grammar groups on LinkedIn, where there are fascinating — and long – discussions of what some people would call grammatical minutiae. However, this week, I saw a discussion that I found a little surprising. The question posed was “Should we continue to teach who and whom to our students?” the real question is: Should we continue to teach the difference between them and when to use each? On my blog, bigwords 101, I talked about the difference between linguistic and grammatical prescriptivism and descriptivism: ▪ Prescriptivists (the camp that I lean toward) think that the rules are there and they should be followed. ▪ Descriptivists believe that language evolves as new usages come into play. Well, if we followed a purely prescriptivist viewpoint, we would still be using the language of centuries ago – thank you, Chaucer. But what would happen if we…