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| Top Ten Reasons for Using this Book | |
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| Introduction | |
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| What's in a Word? | |
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| Spelling It All Out | |
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| Making More: Forming Plurals of Nouns | |
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| So Many Rules! | |
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| Unlocking the Secrets of Root Words, Prefixes, and Suffixes | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Cracking the Code of Punctuation | |
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| Avoiding the Problem of Miscommunication | |
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| The End of the Road | |
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| May I Quote You on That? | |
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| Quotes Within Quotes: Single Quotation Marks | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| More Fun with Punctuation | |
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| The Dreaded Apostrophe | |
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| Cutting It Short: Contractions | |
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| What's Mine Is Yours: Possession | |
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| Joint Versus Individual Possession | |
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| A Rare Occasion: Using an Apostrophe to Form a Plural | |
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| Commendable Comma Comments | |
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| Using Commas with Compound Sentences | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Punctuation Pairs | |
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| Cleansing Your Colon | |
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| The Serviceable Semicolon | |
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| The Power to Divide and Unite: The Hyphen | |
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| May I Interrupt? The Dash | |
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| The Inside Scoop: Parentheses | |
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| Making a Rare Appearance: Square Brackets | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Wrapping It All Up | |
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| Getting Fancy: Italics and Underlining | |
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| Angling for Some Attention: Angle Brackets | |
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| What You're Not Saying...Ellipsis Points | |
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| Slash It All! The Slash/Virgule/Solidus | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Parts of Speech-the Big Eight | |
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| Step Right Up and Name Your Noun | |
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| Pithy Pronouncements on Pronouns | |
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| Three Little Questions for Adjectives | |
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| Show Me the Action (and the Being): Verbs | |
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| Admirable Advice about Adverbs | |
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| What's Your Position on Prepositions? | |
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| Who Put the Junction in Conjunction? | |
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| Heavens to Betsy! and Other Interjections | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| More Pieces of the Puzzle | |
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| Here Come the Hybrids: Verbals | |
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| The Starring Roles: Subject and Predicate | |
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| Making It Complete: Complements | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Let's Have a Few Words | |
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| Finding Fundamental Phrases | |
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| Bringing It Up a Notch: Clauses | |
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| Putting It All Together: Constructing Sentences | |
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| Keeping the Harmony: Subject-Verb Agreement | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Pertinent Points about Pesky Pronouns | |
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| Introducing the Pronoun | |
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| The Numbers Game: Problems with Agreement | |
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| When in Doubt: Vague Pronoun References | |
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| One, Two, Three: What Person for Me? | |
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| Making a Case for Pronouns | |
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| Who and Whom: A Different Slant | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Figuring Out Some Finicky Forms | |
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| Let's Talk Tenses | |
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| Those Irritating Irregular Verbs | |
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| What Kind of Mood Are You In? | |
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| Comparatively Speaking | |
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| Avoiding Double Negatives | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Keeping It Coherent | |
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| Manglers of Meaning: Misplaced Modifiers | |
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| Dangling and Squinting Modifiers | |
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| Parallelism in Writing | |
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| Logically Speaking | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Shaping Strong Sentences | |
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| A Few Words about Fragments | |
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| Reining In Run-on Sentences | |
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| Transitional Words and Phrases | |
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| Classifying the Connectors | |
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| The Biggest Bugbears | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| In Plain English, Please | |
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| Steering Clear of Cliches | |
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| No Need to Repeat Yourself! | |
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| When Less Is More | |
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| Close, but No Cigar: Misused Phrases | |
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| Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Whose Mistakes Are Worst of All? | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Putting Pen to Paper | |
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| Practical and Profitable Preliminaries | |
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| Out in the Open: The Outline | |
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| Delineating the Details of Your First Draft | |
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| Relax and Leave Your Writing Alone-For Now | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| The Final Dress Rehearsal | |
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| Rereading, Revising, and Rewriting | |
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| The Proof Is in the Reading | |
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| When Really Bad Is Really Good | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Maximizing Your Means of Expression | |
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| Short Takes | |
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| Business and Technical Writing | |
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| If X, Then Y: The Cause-and-Effect Essay | |
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| Learning to Look Beyond the Obvious | |
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| The Abridged Version: The Precis | |
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| The Process Paper | |
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| Digging Up the Details: The Research Paper | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Getting Personal | |
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| Taking a Stand: The Argument Essay | |
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| Advancing an Assessment: The Critical Analysis | |
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| Dear Diary: The Journal | |
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| Painting Word Pictures: The Essay of Description | |
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| The Autobiographical Narrative | |
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| An Opportune Occasion to Offer an Opinion | |
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| Egads! E-mail | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Literary Terms You Need to Know | |
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| Echoing Your English Teachers: The Basics | |
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| Beyond the Basics | |
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| In Praise of Prose | |
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| Praising Points of Poetry | |
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| Poetry-The Beat and the Feet | |
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| Oh! The Drama of It All! | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Latin-Alive and Kicking! | |
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| It's Everywhere! Everyday Latin | |
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| Ex Obscuritate in Lucem (From Ignorance to Learning) | |
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| Ignorantia Juris Non Excusat (Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse) | |
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| Feeling a Little Under the Weather? Latin in Medicine | |
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| Sacred Settings: Latin in Church | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| Foreign Languages in Everyday American English | |
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| Neighbors to the South: Spanish | |
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| The French Connection | |
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| Achtung!-Paying Attention to German | |
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| For the Italian in All of Us | |
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| Come Together Right Now: Other Languages | |
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| Checkpoint | |
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| 999 of the Most Commonly Misspelled Words | |
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| Root Words, Prefixes, and Suffixes | |
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| Suggested Substitutes for Wordy Phrases | |
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| Checkpoint Answers | |
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| Index | |