If you believe that you add a comma to a sentence when you need to take a breath, then this guide is essential. The Befuddled Writing Students’ Guide to Commas is for anyone who wants to make his or her writing more polished and professional and who wants a basic understanding of how to use the trickiest of punctuation—the comma.

Formatted in an easy-to-use design, The Befuddled Students’ Guide to Commas features an interactive index and quiz, clear concise instructions, and bulleted examples.

This guide is a part of a series designed to aid English and literature students in their studies as well as anyone else who wants to polish up his or her grammar and learn more about literature. It is designed to be user friendly and to help make English studies more accessible to the average person.

If you believe that you add a comma to a sentence when you need to take a breath, then this guide is essential. The Befuddled Writing Students’ Guide to Commas is for anyone who wants to make his or her writing more polished and professional and who wants a basic understanding of how to use the trickiest of punctuation—the comma.

Formatted in an easy-to-use design, The Befuddled Students’ Guide to Commas features an interactive index and quiz, clear concise instructions, and bulleted examples.

This guide is a part of a series designed to aid English and literature students in their studies as well as anyone else who wants to polish up his or her grammar and learn more about literature. It is designed to be user friendly and to help make English studies more accessible to the average person.

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No writer's or editor's desk is complete without a battered, page-bent copy of the AP Stylebook. However, this not-so-easy-to-use reference of journalistic style is often not up-to-date and leaves reporters and copyeditors unsatisfied. Bill Walsh, copy chief for the Washington Post's business desk, addresses these shortcomings in Lapsing into a Comma. In an opinionated, humorous, and yes, curmudgeonly way, he shows how to apply the basic rules to unique, modern grammar issues. Walsh explains how to deal with perplexing situations such as trendy words, foreign terms, and web speak.

Who knew a stylebook could be so much fun? For lovers of language, Lapsing Into a Comma is a sensible and very funny guide to the technicalities of writing and copy editing. Author Bill Walsh, chief copy editor in the business section of the Washington Post, humorously discusses the changing rules of proper print style in the information age. Is it "e-mail" or "email"? According to established grammatical rules, it should be e-mail, but in common practice, we often use email (which should be pronounced "uhmail," but we all know not to do that). Therefore, email is OK.

Walsh does not advocate tossing your AP Stylebook, but he does encourage using your head and not blindly adhering to formal rules. "A finely tuned ear is at least as important as formal grammar," he says, "and that's not something you can acquire by memorizing a stylebook." What about companies that use punctuation in their logos? Walsh cautions against confusing a logo with a name. You wouldn't use "Tech Stock Surge Boosts Yahoo!" as a headline unless you wrote for a very excitable newspaper. And then there's arbitrary capitalization. "The dot-com era has leveled a wall that Adidas and K.D. Lang and Thirtysomething had already cracked," says Walsh, "and suddenly writers and editors faced with a name are asking, "Is that capitalized?"--a question that's about as appropriate as asking a 5-year-old, 'Do you want that Coke with or without rum?'"

The first half of Lapsing Into a Comma zips along, making you think about the intricacies of grammar and editing--all while trying not to choke on laughter. The second half is Walsh's personally crafted style guide. Remember--Roommate: Two m's, unless you ate a room or mated with a roo. --Dana Van Nest

Reading and Content Advisers - Activity - Glossary - At the Library - FactHound - Index - Book List

Rachel Spark is an irreverent, sexually eager, financially unstable thirty-year-old college instructor who moves back home when her mother is diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. As she tries to ease her mother, a perpetually cheerful woman, toward the inevitable, Rachel turns from one man to the next -- sometimes comically, sometimes catastrophically -- as if her own survival depended upon it.

Ella Bloom, an adult student in Rachel's poetry class, has aspirations beyond her work at a local family planning clinic. But she spends her nights wondering why her husband kissed one of her colleagues and whether it will lead to a full-fledged affair. She is also preoccupied with one of her repeat patients, Georgia, a teenager whose frequent clinic visits speak volumes. What they all have in common is their desire for love, despite its many obstacles.

A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That is a novel rife with wit and compassion. A provocative, assured new voice in literary fiction, Lisa Glatt eyes the yardsticks by which we constantly measure our world and ourselves -- devotion, lust, forgiveness, and courage.

At the center of A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, Lisa Glatt's heroic, hauntingly honest debut, is Rachel Sparks, a thirtysomething college professor who moves back home to sit with her mother while the older woman succumbs to terminal cancer. Glatt frames Rachel's story against a backdrop of women who range in age from 16 to 60, all of whom struggle with the conflicting sense of power versus the chilling vulnerability that seems so essential to their roles as women.

Although Rachel's mother's fate is apparent from the first chapter, Glatt does a commendable job of keeping the reader interested in her characters throughout the entire novel. We follow Rachel as she jumps from man to man, focusing on minute details while ignoring the basic flaws that make these men so fundamentally wrong for her. Along the way we get to know Rachel's student Ella Bloom, who must confront her cheating husband after less than a year of marriage. Ella's days are spent at a women's health clinic treating patients like 16-year-old Georgia Carter, who repeatedly exposes herself to sexually transmitted diseases in the hopes that one of these boys will show her the real affection that she can't get at home. ("Other men and boys noticed Georgia. It was as if they saw straight up inside her, all that she had done ... She understood that her body belonged to the whole damn street.")

While Glatt does an admirable job of showing women's weaknesses--and strengths--when dealing with men, it is her remarkable understanding of the tumultuous relationship that women have with their own bodies that makes this novel unique. From mastectomies to reconstructive surgeries to abortions to virtually anonymous sex, Glatt skillfully demonstrates how complex a woman's relationship with both her body and mind can be, and the tremendous power one often has over another. --Gisele Toueg

With short, easy-to-digest activities that have a sense of humor, Commas helps students learn to use commas correctly. At the same time, they also learn a great deal about sentence structure.

Commas presents material in an interesting way, with language that makes sense to kids. Best of all, it has students using what they learn.

Either way, the review exercises will help reinforce what students learn—and help them perform better on assessment tests as well.

Boost your language libido with Comma Sutra! Filled with quickie faux pas fixes and kinky wordplay, this irresistible, offbeat grammar guide is instant grammar gratification.

Bestselling author and grammarian Dr. Laurie Rozakis will show you how to:

Grammar Tales are funny stories designed to help children understand the essential rules of usage and mechanics. Each book is a 16 page story

Book which discusses the very real possibility that the human soul survives death.

Book which discusses the very real possibility that the human soul survives death.