The Times Writer's Guide Book

A comprehensive and easy-to-use manual on English usage, The Times Writer's Guide takes the reader though grammar, punctuation, spelling and difficult or confusing words. It is also a "how-to" guide to expanding your vocabulary, improving your writing, managing foreign words and phrases and picking your way through abbreviations and acronyms. The posthumously published work of Graham King who died of cancer in 1999, this book is likely to be useful to writers at all levels from school essayists to professional authors and everything in between. Among many other things, King explains what a noun is and takes you through the mysteries of subject and predicate as well as giving advice about the use of bullet points and telling you how to address the prime minister on envelope or in a letter. He also offers a few hints about the developing conventions of e-mail writing and provides a lesson on condolence letter writing. There is an eclectic and not necessarily serious abbreviations list too. OBE, for example stand for "Order of the British Empire; one button exposed (shielded warning that a man's fly is open); other bugger's efforts". And how many people know--or need to--that ROARE stands for "reduction of attitudes and repressed emotions (sex offenders' treatment programme)"? It's rare to find so many aspects of the subject in a single volume. Literary devices, thoughts about style, basic etymology, cliché horrors and CV writing are all included. In places King is very entertaining too. --Susan ElkinRead More