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| Introduction: Embrace grammar as powerful and purposeful | |
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| Words | |
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| Read dictionaries for fun and learning | |
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| Avoid speed bumps caused by misspellings | |
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| Adopt a favorite letter of the alphabet | |
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| Honor the smallest distinctions even between a and the | |
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| Consult a thesaurus to remind yourself of words you already know | |
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| Take a class on how to cross-dress the parts of speech | |
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| Enjoy, rather than fear, words that sound alike | |
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| Learn seven ways to invent words | |
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| Become your own lexicographer | |
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| Take advantage of the short-word economy of English | |
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| Learn when and how to enrich your prose with foreign words | |
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| Points | |
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| Use the period to determine emphasis and space | |
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| Advocate use of the serial comma | |
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| Use the semicolon as a "swinging gate" | |
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| Embrace the three amigos: colon, dash, and parentheses | |
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| Let your ear help govern the possessive apostrophe | |
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| Take advantage of the versatility of quotation marks | |
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| Use the question mark to generate reader curiosity and narrative energy | |
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| Reclaim the exclamation point | |
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| Master the elliptical art of leaving things out | |
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| Reach into the "upper case" to unleash the power of names | |
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| Vary your use of punctuation to create special effects | |
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| Stamdards | |
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| Learn to lie or lay, as well as the principles behind the distinction | |
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| Avoid the "trap" of subject-verb disagreement | |
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| Render gender equality with a smooth style | |
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| Place modifiers where they belong | |
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| Help the reader learn what is "essential" and "nonessential." | |
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| Avoid case mistakes and "hypergrammar." | |
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| Be certain about the uncertain subjunctive and other "moody" subjects | |
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| Identify all sources of ambiguity and confusion | |
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| Show what is literal and what is figurative | |
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| Meaning | |
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| Join subjects and verbs, or separate them for effect | |
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| Use active and passive verbs in combination and with a purpose | |
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| Befriend the lively verb to be | |
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| Switch tenses, but only for strategic reasons | |
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| Politely ignore the language crotchets of others | |
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| Learn the five forms of well-crafted sentences | |
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| Make sentence fragments work for you and the reader | |
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| Use the complex sentence to connect unequal ideas | |
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| Learn how expert writers break the rules in run-on sentences | |
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| Purpose | |
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| Master the uses of nonstandard English | |
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| Add a pinch of dialect for flavor | |
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| Tame taboo language to suit your purposes | |
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| Unleash your associative imagination | |
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| Play with sounds, natural and literary | |
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| Master the distinction between denotation and connotation | |
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| Measure the distance between concrete and abstract language | |
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| Harness the power of particularity | |
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| Have fun with initials and acronyms, but avoid "capital" offenses | |
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| Master the grammar of new forms of writing | |
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| Afterword: Live a life of language | |
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| Words I have misspelled | |
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| Words I have confused | |
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| The Glamour of Grammar quick list | |
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| Acknowledgments | |
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| Index | |