Table of Contents
Introduction 6
Chapter 1 Spelling 9
Spelling Basics 10
Forming Plurals 13
Creating Spelling Mnemonics 16
Prefixes, Suffixes, and Root Words 19
Common Spelling Mistakes 23
Chapter 2 Punctuation 43
End Punctuation 45
Quotation Marks 49
The Apostrophe 56
The Comma 65
Chapter 3 Colons, Semicolons, Dashes, and More 73
The Colon 74
The Semicolon 77
The Hyphen, Dash, and Slash 80
Parentheses 87
Ellipsis Points 92
Italics and Underlining 94
Chapter 4 Main Parts Of Speech 99
The Noun 100
The Pronoun 103
The Adjective 107
The Verb 110
The Adverb 115
The Preposition 119
The Conjunction 122
The Interjection 125
Chapter 5 Pronouns 127
Pronoun Problems 128
Vague Pronoun References 134
First-, Second-, and Third-Person Pronouns 139
Subjective, Objective, and Possessive Pronouns 143
Who and Whom 148
Chapter 6 Additional Parts Of Speech 151
Participles 152
Gerunds 156
Infinitives 158
Subjects and Predicates 161
Complements 164
Chapter 7 Tenses and Forms 169
Verb Tenses 170
Irregular Verbs 175
Verb Moods 182
Making Comparisons 185
Avoiding Double Negatives 188
Chapter 8 Phrases, Clauses, And Sentence Structure 191
Fundamental Phrases 192
Clauses 196
Constructing Sentences 202
Subject-Verb Agreement 205
Chapter 9 Constructing Coherent Sentences 215
Misplaced Modifiers 216
Parallelism 220
Logical Sentences 229
Fragments 237
Run-On Sentences 245
Transitional Words and Phrases 250
Chapter 10 Mistakes and Misused Phrases 255
Clichés 256
Repetition and Wordiness 258
Misused Phrases 263
Common Grammatical Mistakes 266
Common Writing Errors 269
Appendix: Root Words, Prefixes, and Suffixes 272
Index 282
