Comma Sense

Your Guide to Grammar Victory (Punctuation Workbook, Elements of Style)

Ellen Feld

• Publisher: TMA Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781642507263
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Grammar & Punctuation

Guide for Grammar, Voice, and Sentence Structure

"If you're going to have one grammar book on your shelf, make it this one!" — Dani Alcorn, COO at Writing Academy and cofounder of Writer's Secret Sauce

#1 New Release in Writing, Research & Publishing Guides, Composition and Language, Grammar Reference, Semantics, Vocabulary Books, Study & Teaching Reference, Reading Skills, and editing

Comma Sense by Ellen Feld is a style guide for all things grammar. Learn the rules of adverbs, punctuation, abbreviations, prepositions, and much more. Feld shows you how to write technically, professionally, and personally.

Grammar for everyone. Master English grammar with Ellen Feld. Comma Sense goes above and beyond the average grammar book. Professional writers, students, novices, and experts can benefit from learning or relearning the basics of grammar and beyond: em dashes, parentheticals and parallelism, diction and logic, run-on sentences and sentence fragments, and more. Become a master of capitalization and punctuation, subjects and predicates, and contractions and possessives.

Test Your Knowledge. After every chapter, take a quiz to practice your new grammatical skills in this great grammar workbook. At the end of the book, a comprehensive test allows you to utilize all you have learned.

Inside, you'll find:

• The basics of grammar and beyond
• Tips for better writing
• Terrific supplementary resources

Readers who enjoyed The Elements of Style; Actually, the Comma Goes Here; The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation; or The Perfect English Grammar Workbook will love Comma Sense: A Guide to Grammar Victory. Workbook will love Comma Sense: Your Guide to Grammar Victory.

Chapter 1

The Great Eight
(parts of speech)

Introduction

Keywords:

◊parts of speech	◊article
◊verb	◊adverb
◊noun	◊conjunction
◊pronoun	◊preposition
◊adjective	◊interjection

Uh-oh. Here we go. Terms! Why do you need to know the names for things? The very idea of terms has alienated many a would-be grammarian. But not here and now!

Once you reframe the idea of terms, you’ll feel good about using them. Terms are great because they give us a way to talk about grammar. They provide a shared vocabulary for you and me so that we can understand each other. They give us a grammar lexicon. A lexicon is a vocabulary that’s specific to a group or subject. Grammar has its own lexicon.

You’re about to meet the eight parts of speech. If you’ve met them before, that’s okay. Sometimes we need to be reintroduced to get really familiar and comfortable with a topic.

You’ve probably heard about pronouns and conjunctions and prepositions and interjections, but do you have a clear idea of what they are? What’s an adverb, anyway? You’ll find out in this chapter as you begin to identify the different parts of speech and see how they fit together to make a sentence.

Lesson 1: Verbs...

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Great Eight (parts of speech)
• Chapter 2 Which Witch Is Which? (mixed-up words)
• Chapter 3 It’s or Its? (contractions and possessives)
• Chapter 4 Team Work (subjects and predicates)
• Chapter 5 As You Were Saying (sentence fragments)
• Chapter 6 Where We’ll Stop, Nobody Knows (run-on sentences)
• Chapter 7 They Write, Not Writes, right? (standard verb forms)
• Chapter 8 You are You (pronouns)
• Chapter 9 Let’s Agree to Agree (agreement: subjects and verbs, pronouns and antecedents)
• Chapter 10 Along the Same Lines (shifts in person, tense, and structure)
• Chapter 11: Say What You Mean (clarity, concision, diction, and logic)
• Chapter 12: How to Begin and Why Stop at a period? (capitalization and punctuation)
• Comprehensive Quiz
• P.S.
• References
• Resources
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author