Grammar, usage, and style

Grammar and usage
Style guides

Grammar and usage
First, the classics: William Strunk's The Elements of Style (1918, pre–E.B. White) http://www.bartleby.com/141/index.html; H.L. Mencken's The American Language (1921) http://www.bartleby.com/185; and H.W. Fowler's The King's English (1908) http://www.bartleby.com/116/index.html—all available in their entirety online.

Online English Grammar. http://www.edufind.com/english/grammar Anthony Hughes's online grammar has the adult learner of English in mind. 120 topics are illustrated with ingenious and often surprising examples.

Purdue's Online Writing Lab. http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/index.html The grammar, spelling, and punctuation section of Purdue's Online Writing Lab is organized accessibly in outline form under categories such as "parts of speech" and "sentence construction." The site offers dozens of handouts used in the lab.

Grammar Bytes. http://www.chompchomp.com/menu.htm First prize for a great site name—and for interactivity and humor—goes to Robin Simmons's energetic site. Lively if sometimes simplistic exercises are accompanied by thorough explanations, tip sheets, and handouts.

Guide to Grammar and Style. http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing The alphabetical organization of Jack Lynch's otherwise appealingly discursive guide creates some odd alphabedfellows ("dash, data, definite article"; "shall, sic, slashes").

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Style guides
Government Printing Office Style Manual 2000. http://www.gpoaccess.gov/stylemanual The Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Style Guide aren't available online, alas, but the GPO manual is available in both HTML and PDF formats. In addition to copious arcana from the days of hot lead, the GPO manual devotes an exhaustive chapter to the geographic divisions of U.S. territory. Chicago posts FAQs at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq.html#10

American Heritage Book of English Usage (1996). http://www.bartleby.com/64 Sections on style (parallelism, passives, wordiness, redundancy), word choice (308 problem words), and gender, plus a rapidly aging essay on the hazards of e-mail and more than you ever wanted to know about emoticons.

The Times (of London) Style Guide (1997). http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,2941,00.html The Times's style guide is designed for the convenience of journalists: "fairytale, no hyphen," "film star, two words." Terse and easy to use.

alt.usage.english. http://www.alt-usage-english.org The Web site of this newsgroup features collections of FAQ files on usage disputes, word origins, and phrase origins.

Web Style Guide (1999). http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/contents.html Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton's Web Style Guide contains excellent advice on preparing text for the Web. New edition on the way.

APA Electronic Reference Formats. http://www.apastyle.org/elecref.html Answers to commonly asked questions on citing electronic sources from the 5th edition of the APA Style Manual. A brave attempt to codify evolving usage.

Writing with Sources. http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos/sources Harvard's student guide to documenting sources contains a section on formatting references that compares MLA, APA, and several other common styles.

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