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This handy workbook is ideal for teachers, students in middle school through college, ESL students, homeschoolers, and professionals. Valuable for anyone who takes tests or writes reports, letters, Web pages, e-mails, or blogs, The Blue Book offers instant answers to everyday English usage questions.
"Designed to answer the most pressing grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and usage questions . . . In this revised and updated tenth edition of her best-selling book, Jane Straus adds a new section on Confusing Words and Homonyms with hundreds of the trickiest words defined and explained. Hailed as 'a masterpiece of clarity and usefulness.'"
—From the Foreword by Mignon Fogarty, creator of the Grammar Girl podcast
The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation is filled with easy-to-understand rules,real-world examples, dozens of reproducible exercises, and pre- and post-tests.
This handy workbook is ideal for teachers, students in middle school through college, ESL students, homeschoolers, and professionals. Valuable for anyone who takes tests or writes reports, letters, Web pages, e-mails, or blogs, The Blue Book offers instant answers to everyday English usage questions.
Praise for Jane Straus and The Blue Book
"Clearly presented so that you can easily find the informationyou're looking for. This is great for students or for anyone who has troubleremembering the rules of grammar and punctuation."
—Kate Russell, BBC World/ClickOnline
"Never has there been such a well-arranged, easily navigatedguidebook as this. It is perfect for the homeschool family. One of the mostpractical, useable, beneficial resources, it doubles both as a quick referenceguide and student workbook (with answers in the back)!"
—The Old Schoolhouse Magazine
"Grammarians and citizens, I invite you to raise a glass to Jane Straus. The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation is one-stop shopping for comprehensive grammar and style rules and is as charming as it is useful. I can't imagine one person whose writing wouldn't benefit enormously from reading this book."
—Kate McCulley, The Grammar Vandal, www.thegrammarvandal.com
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
581 of 627 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Full of errors and omissions,
This review is from: The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation: An Easy-to-Use Guide with Clear Rules, Real-World Examples, and Reproducible Quizzes (Paperback)
I have been an English professor for fifteen years, and my advice is that people interested in improving their grammar find a better book than this one. It is full of errors. I care very much about getting students to write and speak properly (for many it's a key to success), and that's why I am so disappointed in this book. (By the way, I have not written any book that competes with this one for your dollars.) Better material is available free of charge on the internet.
I will list some errors below, all found in the very first section of the book, and you will note that in all the canned testimonials that appear on this site, not one of my statements will be refuted. Instead, you will hear about how this book "answered all of my questions" or "helped me land my dream job" or "turned my company around," etc. Nonsense. ERROR 1: On page 2 we are told, "A subject will come before a phrase beginning with 'of'." This is simply not a rule; subjects often follow "of". Consider this sentence: "Hoping to win the respect of her employer, Sandra learned to speak fluent English." The subject, Sandra, comes after a phrase beginning with "of" ("of her employer"), not before one. Someone who followed the rule in the book might falsely conclude that "respect" is the subject, as it comes before "of". ERROR 2: There are grammar and punctuation errors in the writing itself. On page 1 we read, "Being able to identify the subject and verb correctly will also help you with commas and semicolons as you will see later." It is certainly odd that a sentence about proper punctuation should itself include a punctuation error; a mandatory comma has been omitted between "semicolons" and "as." ERROR 3: On page 2 we are told, most unhelpfully, "To find the subject and verb, always find the verb first." (This is like a recipe that says, "To bake a cake and make frosting for it, first bake the cake," and leaves its instructions on cake-baking at that.) Once you find the verb, the book continues, "Then ask who or what performed the verb." This sloppy wording is almost bound to cause confusion. Consider this sentence: "In spite of the bad instructions, the error was found by the student." The verb is "was found," and the student did the finding. It would be natural to suppose, then, that the student "performed the verb" and thus is the subject. The subject, however, is "the error," not "the student". All of these problems (and others I have not mentioned) are found on the first two pages of the book. Please note that no one promoting this book will defend the idea that subjects must precede phrases beginning with "of," or that finding "who performed the verb" gives students enough to go on to determine the subject, or that the author makes no punctuation errors of her own in the book. They as good as admit that some of the rules in the book are wrong, that the explanations are inadequate, and that the author makes punctuation errors. So one wonders what might motivate these people to endorse the book. As for my motive, it is this: concern for students who will be (and have been) misled by this faulty product. The previous edition used crucial terms that it did not bother to define--like "direct object," "object of the preposition," and even "preposition" itself. Imagine a grammar book that leaves students in the dark about the meaning of the word "preposition," and you have some idea of what this book is like. As for crucial grammatical elements like transitive verbs, the subjunctive, linking verbs, helping verbs--they were not even mentioned. Will anyone step forward and say, "In this edition, 'preposition' is defined and transitive verbs are discussed"? Of course not. This book omits even very basic material, and, what is worse, much of what it does say is misleadingly phrased or just plain wrong. You can do better.
100 of 107 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Lesson Planning Nightmare!,
This review is from: The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation: An Easy-to-Use Guide with Clear Rules, Real-World Examples, and Reproducible Quizzes (Paperback)
I was going to use this book to plan lessons for my ESL class, but it's bad to almost a weird extent. For example, everyone else in the world talks about "subordinate clauses" and "independent clauses." This strange book uses the terms "weak clauses" and "strong clauses" instead. If your students are going to have to take standardized tests, stay away from this book! No test will ask them what a "weak clause" is--there is no such thing! Why not use the terms students will be asked about, or the terms used in other books they will study?
Then there are things that are even odder: made up rules that are not true. The book says, for example, "do not use a comma when the sentence starts with a strong clause followed by a weak clause." So, according to the book, the following is correct: "I was persuaded by my friends to buy the book although my teacher said it was bad." But that's absolutely wrong. There has to be a comma between "book" and "although". ("Although" begins a subordinate clause--or "weak clause" in the private lingo of this book.) I couldn't believe my eyes! Then I see that the author of the book actually obeys this non-rule and leaves commas out all over the place in the lessons. So I went to the author's website (where all the rules in the book are available for free, anyway, so why buy it?) and found the following comments in the author's "Grammar Blog" for 2/12/08: "Thanks to Shawna L. for pointing out that the third example in my last newsletter had an error," and "Thanks to Kathy D. for pointing my sloppy grammar." What kind of grammar teacher needs students to point out his or her own grammatical errors? At least my visit to the site cleared up the mystery of this book. The author just doesn't know too much about grammar.
47 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not a comprehensive grammar reference,
By Jamie (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation: An Easy-to-Use Guide with Clear Rules, Real-World Examples, and Reproducible Quizzes (Paperback)
I bought this hoping for a grammar reference that was as comprehensive as The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. I was very disappointed. It is 75 pages of rules (many erroneous based on the other reviews, which I wish I'd read prior to purchasing) followed by 78 pages of quizzes and answers. There is no index. The lack of an index makes it particularly ineffective as a reference.
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