Patricia O'Conner - Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English Books

Pros: Written with great expertise, a common-sense approach, and a sense of humor.
Cons: Nary a one!!

On a cold blustery Friday afternoon during the last week of February 2001 – while the snow blanketed my coastal Maine home and frigid temperatures kept all members of the mkp51 household tucked inside our house – I authored an Epinions editorial entitled...

Pros: Grammar
Cons: Not very ambitious

Gone are the days of the draconian teacher assigning sentence diagrams in English class or the person who feels comfortable answering the phone, "With whom would you like to speak?" Our grammar, once stringently taught in school, has succumbed...

Pros: Practical, smart, and cheap -- just like me!
Cons: I am unable to memorize everything; eating the book doesn't help

As a professional editor and not-so-professional writer, I'm always looking for the right resources to complement my reference desk. The good ol' Elements of Style is a must-have, of course, but while the pithy nature of Strunk and White's...

Pros: Easy, good advice
Cons: could be twice as long

Patricia T. O’Conner has taken on a topic many find boring or intimidating and delivered a wonderful, humorous book on grammar that anyone can feel comfortable using.

The former editor at The New York Times put together a breezy though...

Pros: Nice flowing prose that has actually made learning Grammar fun.
Cons: Can lead you to believe grammatical rules are set in stone when they are not.

In my last review I came upon a grammatical query when I had to make United States a possessive. I knew there was some rule that applied here. When a word ends in an s and you must make it possessive, sometimes you simply add an...

Pros: easy and fun to read, very amusing and entertaining
Cons: none

As many people who read my reviews know, I love books, and I love Barnes and Noble. I always see books I want in Barnes and Nobles but can't afford. What do I do when I can't afford a book? I write the name down and keep it on my list. The other day I...

Pros: Easy to use, uncomplicated.
Cons: None that I could see.

Okay, okay, so, I got a lot of comments to my earlier opinion on the book "WOE IS I" by Patricia T. O'Conner, or I should say "non-opinion," about this book, since I hadn't even seen it and went on a tangent about the state of good...

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I recall waiting for my turn at a reference desk while the man ahead of me was asking about Beatles tapes. The branch we were in had a few, but not all of them. He wanted to know where he could find the tapes that the branch didn't have. The quote...

Pros: It explains the secrets to grammar in refreshingly jargon-free sentences
Cons: Some arguments are too complex for a non-English speaking person to understand.

Excepting the chapter on e-mail etiquette that ought to make many people-even grammar snobs-feel a tad guilty: "E-mail," she writes, "is no excuse for lousy English." Let your audience determine your attention to tone and mechanics; use salutations and signatures; resist the urge to indiscriminately forward mail; and leave those emoticons and abbreviations at home, she says. Kudos to her that she has a heart to remind about this to all of us. The examples are witty and economical. When is "majority" plural, and when singular? How does saying "Trixie loves spaghetti more than I?" mean something completely different than "Trixie loves spaghetti more than me?" While the volume is certainly handy to someone struggling with grammar basics-there are few style guides so breezy-the "Verbal Abuse" section will appeal to language experts and purists, especially those who decry the use of partner as a verb, or grow with a direct object (as in "grow the business"). THe last time I read similar things were in a CD program called "Learn English through Success Secrets" and "Learn English through Love & Romance".