This is a book for any writer or reader. As I love books about Grammar I jumped on it without hesitation after hearing an interview on RN with the author who was visiting on a book tour. And it's a cracker, as they say here in Australia. A clever, witty New Yorker, and no surprise, he's an editor at Random House.
It's an incisive book full of all the subtleties of both British English and US English.There are lots of differences and similarities between them, relevant and otherwise. As an American living in Australia it took me a long time to navigate these nuanced distinctions.
For pedantic types, reading this book will become an obsession. With plenty of humorous anecdotes he goes into all those pesky rules to follow, or not, concerning everything ones needs to know about creating a coherent idea. Are they two ideas or one sentence? Or both? Is "Or both" even a sentence? And, do I have permission to break a rule, if indeed, it is even a rule in the first place? How to use commas, colons, italics, etc, etc... Myself, I'm always returning to older texts, forever culling and rephrasing sentences, nitpicking endlessly over the smallest details in the sentence structure. And personally, I'm perfectly asstounded by all the spelling mistakes I make.
And for my Francophone friends up North, in the land where Capitol Punishment is dished out (metaphorically,... S.V.P.) to the illiterate barbarians who invade from The US (mostly Los Angeles), I say, Bonne Lecture!
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