Merriam-Webster's Vocabulary Builder


Mary Wood Cornog - 1994
     Example sentences and brief explanatory comments provide a rich context to bring the words to life, and quizzes are provided to encourage reuse and recall of words and to reinforce memory of them. All of these features combine to make this a valuable tool for students preparing for standardized tests or simply seeking to expand their English vocabulary.

Roget's College Thesaurus in Dictionary Form, The New American: Revised and Enlarged Edition


Philip D. Morehead - 1957
    Published in hardcover as The Penguin Roget's College Thesaurus in Dictionary Form, this new paperback edition of the 20-million-copy bestselling thesaurus has been fully revised, expanded, and updated for the modern home, school, or office.

501 Russian Verbs


Thomas R. Beyer Jr. - 1992
    The 501 most commonly used Russian 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 in the Cyrillic alphabet. Added material related to verbs and verb usage is also presented, including lists of hundreds more regular verbs, idiomatic verb usage, and more.

Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read


Brooks Landon - 2013
     Great writing begins with the sentence. Whether it’s two words (“Jesus wept.”) or William Faulkner’s 1,287-word sentence in Absalom! Absalom!, sentences have the power to captivate, entertain, motivate, educate, and, most importantly, delight. Yet, the sentence-oriented approach to writing is too often overlooked in favor of bland economy. Building Great Sentences teaches you to write better sentences by luxuriating in the pleasures of language. Award-winning Professor Brooks Landon draws on examples from masters of long, elegant sentences—including Don DeLillo, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and Samuel Johnson—to reveal the mechanics of how language works on thoughts and emotions, providing the tools to write powerful, more effective sentences.

Secret Lives of Great Authors


Robert Schnakenberg - 2008
       With outrageous and uncensored profiles of everyone from William Shakespeare to Thomas Pynchon, Secret Lives of Great Authors tackles all the tough questions your high school teachers were afraid to ask: What’s the deal with Lewis Carroll and little girls? Is it true that J. D. Salinger drank his own urine? How many women?and men?did Lord Byron actually sleep with? And why was Ayn Rand such a big fan of Charlie’s Angels? Classic literature was never this much fun in school!

Stet: An Editor's Life


Diana Athill - 2000
    Stet is a must-read for the literarily curious, who will revel in Athill's portraits of such great literary figures as Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Mordecai Richler, and others. Spiced with candid observations about the type of people who make brilliant writers and ingenious publishers (and the idiosyncrasies of both), Stet is an invaluable contribution to the literature of literature, and in the words of the Sunday Telegraph, "all would-be authors and editors should have a copy."

Copyediting and Proofreading for Dummies


Suzanne Gilad - 2007
    Polish your skills, build a winning resume and land the job you've always wanted. Books, magazines, Web sites, corporate documents - find out how to improve any type of publication and make yourself indispensable to writers, editors, and your boss.Balance between style and rules Master the art of the query Use proofreader symbols Edit and proof electronic documents Build a solid freelancing career

How to Write Anything: A Complete Guide


Laura Brown - 2014
    Need to know how to format your résumé for that job application? How do you write a cover letter that will stand out? Wondering how to request a letter of recommendation for graduate school? Trying to craft a get-well note that will really help? How informal is too informal when instant messaging in the office? What do you write on the website for your small business? What should you say in a wedding invitation? Or a divorce announcement?With over 200 how-to entries and easy-to-use models organized into three comprehensive sections on work, school, and personal life, How to Write Anything covers a wide range of topics that make it an essential guide for the whole family.

How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling


James N. Frey - 1987
    Talent and inspiration can't be taught, but Frey does provide scores of helpful suggestions and sensible rules and principles.An international bestseller, How to Write a Damn Good Novel will enable all writers to face that intimidating first page, keep them on track when they falter, and help them recognize, analyze, and correct the problems in their own work.

How to Speak and Write Correctly


Joseph Devlin - 1910
    Poverty thrust them forward instead of keeping them back. Therefore, if you are poor make your circumstances a means to an end. Have ambition, keep a goal in sight and bend every energy to reach that goal. A story is told of Thomas Carlyle the day he attained the highest honor the literary world could confer upon him when he was elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh University. After his installation speech, in going through the halls, he met a student seemingly deep in study.

The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking


Dale Carnegie - 1962
    Now streamlined and updated, the book that has literally put millions on the highway to greater accomplishment and success can show you how to have maximum impact as a speaker--every day, and in every situation that demands winning others over to your point of view.

Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory


Peter Barry - 1995
    This new and expanded third edition continues to offer students and readers the best one-volume introduction to the field.The bewildering variety of approaches, theorists and technical language is lucidly and expertly unraveled. Unlike many books which assume certain positions about the critics and the theories they represent, Peter Barry allows readers to develop their own ideas once first principles and concepts have been grasped.

The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You


Ella Berthoud - 2013
    It offers distraction, entertainment, and an opportunity to unwind or focus. But it can also be something more powerful—a way to learn about how to live. Read at the right moment in your life, a novel can—quite literally—change it. The Novel Cure is a reminder of that power. To create this apothecary, the authors have trawled two thousand years of literature for novels that effectively promote happiness, health, and sanity, written by brilliant minds who knew what it meant to be human and wrote their life lessons into their fiction. Structured like a reference book, readers simply look up their ailment, be it agoraphobia, boredom, or a midlife crisis, and are given a novel to read as the antidote. Bibliotherapy does not discriminate between pains of the body and pains of the head (or heart). Aware that you’ve been cowardly? Pick up To Kill a Mockingbird for an injection of courage. Experiencing a sudden, acute fear of death? Read One Hundred Years of Solitude for some perspective on the larger cycle of life. Nervous about throwing a dinner party? Ali Smith’s There but for The will convince you that yours could never go that wrong. Whatever your condition, the prescription is simple: a novel (or two), to be read at regular intervals and in nice long chunks until you finish. Some treatments will lead to a complete cure. Others will offer solace, showing that you’re not the first to experience these emotions. The Novel Cure is also peppered with useful lists and sidebars recommending the best novels to read when you’re stuck in traffic or can’t fall asleep, the most important novels to read during every decade of life, and many more. Brilliant in concept and deeply satisfying in execution, The Novel Cure belongs on everyone’s bookshelf and in every medicine cabinet. It will make even the most well-read fiction aficionado pick up a novel he’s never heard of, and see familiar ones with new eyes. Mostly, it will reaffirm literature’s ability to distract and transport, to resonate and reassure, to change the way we see the world and our place in it.The Economist"Astute and often amusing . . . a charming addition to any library. Time spent leafing through its pages is inspiring - even therapeutic."

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything


David Bellos - 2011
    Using translation as his lens, David Bellos shows how much we can learn about ourselves by exploring the ways we use translation, from the historical roots of written language to the stylistic choices of Ingmar Bergman, from the United Nations General Assembly to the significance of James Cameron's Avatar.Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across human experience to describe why translation sits deep within us all, and why we need it in so many situations, from the spread of religion to our appreciation of literature; indeed, Bellos claims that all writers are by definition translators. Written with joie de vivre, reveling both in misunderstanding and communication, littered with wonderful asides, it promises any reader new eyes through which to understand the world. In the words of Bellos: "The practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different: we speak different tongues, and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same—that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist. Nor could anything we would like to call social life. Translation is another name for the human condition."

Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words


Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge - 1996
    Her exuberant, critically acclaimed teaching guide takes instructors, writers, and general readers into the very heart and intensity of life and the craft of expressing what one feels through the written word.