Your Own Words

by Wallraff, Barbara

• ISBN13: 9781582432830
• ISBN10: 158243283X
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-03-09
• Publisher: Counterpoint

Summary

If you have a language question, where do you go for the answer? How do you keep proper syntax from sounding stiff, and, on the other hand, how do you keep conversational language from being embarrassingly incorrect?

Barbara Wallraff, the author of The Atlantic's Word Court column, offers answers to these crucial questions. On one level, Your Own Words is a guide to using and understanding language references--dictionaries, thesauruses, stylebooks, usage guides, grammars, writing guides, and the Internet--with emphasis on how the different kinds of resources can help you answer different kinds of questions.

On a deeper level, however, Your Own Words is about how to make good form your own. It helps you turn these various, often contradictory references into the tools that every experienced and confident user of language needs.In the world of language commentary, Barbara Wallraff offers an unequaled combination of authority, accessibility, and popularity. Her book shows you how to develop a genuine style that's both correct and personal–a style that expresses you at your best. Illuminated throughout with anecdotes and selections from the Word Court columns, Your Own Words does what very few books on usage even attempt: It shows every reader--amateur, professional, student, or graduate--how to think about what goes into good style.

"I think her judgment is flawless. I never disagree with her." --Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography

Author Biography

Barbara Wallraff, a senior editor and the back-page "Word Court" and "Word Fugitives" columnist for The Atlantic, has worked for the magazine since 1983. In the world of language commentary, Barbara offers an unequaled combination of authority, accessibility, and popularity. Besides her work for The Atlantic, she is a weekly syndicated columnist for King Features. She is the author of the nationally best-selling book Word Court and Your Own Words.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
CHAPTER ONE My Own Words	1	(10)
The purpose of "correct English" isn't to lord it over others but to communicate with them. Easier said than done.
CHAPTER TWO Secrets Dictionaries Know	11	(42)
Rarely do we let dictionaries help us as much as they could. And to get full benefit, all we'd have to do is pay attention.
CHAPTER THREE Getting the Answers You Want	53	(24)
An imaginary perfect dictionary, how the real dictionaries compare with it, and how to choose the dictionary that suits you best.
CHAPTER FOUR The Infinite Resource	77	(28)
The Internet is an astonishingly wide-ranging and authoritative repository of answers to language questions, as long as you know where and how to look.
CHAPTER FIVE The Kind of Style You Can Buy	105	(18)
Stylebooks can simplify everyone's writing life. Here's why.
CHAPTER SIX Read the Manual	123	(40)
Usage manuals are chock-a-block with valuable guidance you won't find anywhere else. But like every other kind of reference work, they give widely divergent advice. Come meet the leading manuals and get to know them.
CHAPTER SEVEN Special-Purpose Tools	163	(34)
Etymological dictionaries, dictionaries of colloquialisms and slang, quotation dictionaries, visual dictionaries, reverse dictionaries, thesauri, pronunciation guides, grammar books, learners' dictionaries, foreign dictionaries, old dictionaries, and other nifty resources.
CHAPTER EIGHT Do It Yourself	197	(56)
Lots of questions, including many of the kind that word lovers love best: questions for which no definitive answers exist, leaving us to think them through for ourselves.
CHAPTER NINE Your Own Words	253	(12)
But wasn't the idea to be able to communicate?
Index	265