English Essentials / Edition 3

by John Langan

Overview

John Langan's English Essentials offers guidance through the grammar, punctuation, and usage skills needed for success in college and beyond. In short, English Essentials is an efficient, accessible, and helpful guide to mastering practical English skills.The book is divided into four parts — Part One covers fifteen basic skills; Part Two offers more in-depth information about those and other skills; Part Three presents the essential skills of proofreading, and Part Four covers spelling improvement and dictionaryuse. This student-friendly organization and structure makes the book easy to navigate and a flexible guide.Each section provides essential instructions followed by ampleactivities to encourage learning in the best possible way: by doing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780073533322
Publisher:	McGraw Hill LLC
Publication date:	01/20/2012
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	428,235
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 10.70(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

John Langan has taught reading and writing at Atlantic Cape Community College for more than 25 years. The author of a popular series of college textbooks on both writing and reading, John enjoys the challenge of developing instructive materials that are clear and lively. Before teaching, he earned advanced degrees in writing at Rutgers University and in reading at Rowan University. He also spent a year writing fiction that “is now at the back of a drawer waiting to be discovered and acclaimed posthumously.” While in school, he supported himself by working as a truck driver, a machinist, a battery assembler, a hospital attendant, and an apple packer. In addition to his wife and Philly sports teams, his passions include reading and conveying to nonreaders the pleasure and power of books. Through Townsend Press, his educational publishing company, he has developed the nonprofit “Townsend Library”—a collection of more than 100 new and classic stories that appeal to readers of any age.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Instructor

Introduction

About the Book

Becoming a Better Writer

Writing Assignments
Part One: Fourteen Basic Skills

Preview

1: Subjects and Verbs

2: Irregular Verbs

3: Subject-Verb Agreement

4: Sentence Types

5: Fragments I

6: Fragments II

7: Run-Ons and Comma Splices I

8: Run-Ons and Comma Splices II

9: The Comma

10: The Apostrophe

11: Quotation Marks

12: Homonyms

13: Capital Letters

14: Parallelism
Part Two: Extending the Skills

Preview

15: Preparing a Paper

16: Punctuation Marks

17: Pronoun Forms

18: Pronoun Problems

19: Adjectives and Adverbs

20: Misplaced and Dangling Modifiers

21: Word Choice

22: Numbers and Abbreviations

23: More about Subjects and Verbs

24: More about Subject-Verb Agreement

25: More about Verbs

26: Even More about Verbs

27: More about Run-Ons and Comma Splices

28: More about Commas

29: More about Apostrophes

30: More about Quotation Marks

31: More about Homonyms

32: More about Capital Letters
Part Three: Proofreading

Preview

33: Basics about Proofreading

34: Ten Proofreading Tests
Part Four: Related Matters

Preview

35: Spelling Improvement

36: Parts of Speech

37: Dictionary Use

Index