A bestseller through six editions, Writing Fiction by novelists Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French explores the elements of fiction, providing practical writing techniques and concrete examples. Written in a tone that is personal and non-prescriptive, the text encourages students to develop proficiency through each step of the writing process, offering an abundance of exercises designed to spur writing and creativity. The text also integrates diverse, contemporary short stories in every chapter in the belief that the reading of inspiring fiction goes hand-in-hand with the writing of fresh and exciting stories.

    With more than 350,000 words, phrases, and senses, hundreds of explanatory notes, and more than a thousand illustrations, this dictionary provides themost comprehensive and accurate coverage of American English available.The dictionary draws on the two-billion-word Oxford English Corpus and the unrivaled citation files of the world-renowned Oxford English Dictionary to provide the most accurate and richly descriptive picture of American English ever offered in any dictionary. The Third Edition offers a thoroughlyupdated text, with revisions throughout and approximately 2,000 new words, phrases, and meanings. Many new words relate to fast-moving areas such as computing, technology, current affairs, and ecology, while others have recently entered the popular lexicon. Usage notes have been updated in light ofthe most recent Corpus evidence, and a completely new in-text feature on Word Trends charts usage for rapidly changing words and phrases such as carbon, mobile, or tweet. In addition, the volume has an attractive, modern new text design that makes entries easier to read and find.One of the hallmarks of the New Oxford American Dictionary is the way it reflects the living language. Unlike in more traditional dictionaries, where meanings are ordered chronologically according to the history of the language, each entry plainly shows the principal meaning or meanings of the word, organized by importance in today's English. Thus readers can be confident that the first definition they see is the one most likely to be used by people today, and is not a sense that has been obsolete for two centuries.Offering clear, authoritative, and precise information, with the in-depth and up-to-date coverage that users need and expect, the New Oxford American Dictionary is the benchmark by which all other American dictionaries are measured.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    If its purpose is to entertain or to provoke thought, it makes readers want to come back for more.Revised and updated, this guide covers four essential aspects of good writing:Individual words - spelling variations, hyphenation, frequently confused homonyms, frequently misused words and phrases, irregular plurals and negatives, and uses of capitalization and type style to add special meaningsPunctuation - the role of each mark in achieving clarity and affecting tone, and demonstration of how misuses can lead to ambiguitySyntax and structure - agreement of subject and verb, parallel construction, modifiers, tenses, pronouns, active versus passive voice, and moreStyle - advice on the less hard-and-fast areas of clarity and tone, including sentence length and order, conciseness, simplification, reading level, jargon and cliches, and subtletyFilled with self-test exercises and whimsical literary quotations, "Grammatically Correct" steers clear of academic stuffiness, focusing instead on practical strategies and intuitive explanations.Discussions are designed to get to the heart of a concept and provide a sufficient sense of when and how to use it, along with examples that show what ambiguities or misinterpretations might result if the rules are not followed. In cases where there is more than one acceptable way to do something, the approach is not to prescribe one over another but simply to describe the options.Readers of this book will never break the rules of language again - unintentionally."

    For four decades, he has worked for newspapers, from the Sun to the Financial Times, from local weeklies that sold a few thousand copies to the Guardian, with its global readership of nine million, turning the sow's ear of rough-and-ready reportage into a passable imitation of a silk purse.The chaos might be sloppy syntax, a disregard for grammar or a fundamental misunderstanding of what grammar is. It could be an adherence to "rules" that have no real basis and get in the way of fluent, unambiguous communication at the expense of ones that are actually useful. Clear, honest use of English has many enemies: politicians, business and marketing people, local authority and civil service jargonauts, rail companies, estate agents, academics ... and some journalists. This is the book to help defeat them.

    Complete text (without the four Supplement volumes) reproduced micrographically of the 13 volume Oxford English Dictionary published in 1933.Volume 1. A-OVolume 2. P-Z

    The Sociology Book takes on some of humankind's biggest questions: What is society? What makes it tick? Why do we interact in the way that we do with our friends, coworkers, and rivals? The Sociology Book profiles the world's most renowned sociologists and more than 100 of their biggest ideas, including issues of equality, diversity, identity, and human rights; the effects of globalization; the role of institutions; and the rise of urban living in modern societyEasy to navigate and chock-full of key concepts, profiles of major sociological thinkers, and conversation starters galore, this is a must-have, in-a-nutshell guide to some of the most fascinating questions on earth.The Sociology Book is part of the award-winning Big Ideas Simply Explained series, designed to distill big ideas and elusive theories into graspable, memorable concepts, using an approachable graphic treatment and creative typography.

    The 501 most commonly used Italian verbs are listed in table form, one verb per page, and conjugated in all tenses, identified by English infinitive forms. Verbs are both regular and irregular, and are presented alphabetically for easy reference. Added material related to verbs and verb usage is also presented, including lists of hundreds more regular verbs, idiomatic verb usage, and more.

    Perfect for those who want to pick up some new slang and those who want to translate it, Urban Dictionary is a gritty and witty look at our ever-changing language.Urbandictionary.com is a wildly successful site that encourages users to define the world with their own unique terms. In Urban Dictionary, site founder Aaron Peckham culls his more than 170,000 definitions for the funniest, and most provocative phrases that define the modern slang scene.Within urbandictionary.com's lively lexicon are:* business provocative--Attire used to provoke sexual attention in the workplace.* compunicate--To chat with someone in the same room via instant messenging service instead of in person.* dandruff--A person who "flakes out" and ditches their friends. * wingman--A guy who takes one for the team by hooking up with a hot girl's ugly friend so his own friend can hook up with the hot girl.Perfect for those who want to pick up some new slang and those who want to translate it, Urban Dictionary is a gritty and witty look at our ever-changing language.Urban Dictionary covers the language that encompasses the trials and tribulations that anyone under 30 encounters--and leaves everyone over 30 scratching their heads but wanting to know more.