Comma Sense: Your Guide to Grammar Victory

by Ellen Feld

Guide for Grammar, Voice, and Sentence Structure

“If you're going to have one grammar book on your shelf, make it this one!” —Dani Alcorn, COO at Writing Academy and cofounder of Writer's Secret Sauce

#1 New Release in Writing, Research & Publishing Guides, Composition and Language, Grammar Reference, Semantics, Vocabulary Books, Study & Teaching Reference, Reading Skills, and editing

Comma Sense by Ellen Feld is a style guide for all things grammar. Learn the rules of adverbs, punctuation, abbreviations, prepositions, and much more. Feld shows you how to write technically, professionally, and personally.

Grammar for everyone. Master English grammar with Ellen Feld. Comma Sense goes above and beyond the average grammar book. Professional writers, students, novices, and experts can benefit from learning or relearning the basics of grammar and em dashes, parentheticals and parallelism, diction and logic, run-on sentences and sentence fragments, and more. Become a master of capitalization and punctuation, subjects and predicates, and contractions and possessives.

Test Your Knowledge. After every chapter, take a quiz to practice your new grammatical skills in this great grammar workbook. At the end of the book, a comprehensive test allows you to utilize all you have learned.

Inside, you’ll

The basics of grammar and beyondTips for better writingTerrific supplementary resources

Readers who enjoyed The Elements of Style; Actually, the Comma Goes Here; The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation; or The Perfect English Grammar Workbook will love Comma A Guide to Grammar Victory. Workbook will love Comma Your Guide to Grammar Victory.

Genres: Nonfiction

242 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 18, 2022

Reviews

[Meghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great refresher on basic grammar. Straightforward and learned a couple things.

[Cathryn Conroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One notable fact on which almost everyone will agree is that when it comes to English grammar, there is nothing about it that is "common sense," which makes the title of this book all the more clever.

Written by Ellen Sue Feld, this is a smart, concise, and easy-to-understand book about everything from possessives to predicates, contractions to capitalization, and sentence fragments to subordinating conjunctions. And it's a book for everyone, including those who think they know everything there is to know about grammar. Wrong! There is always something new you can learn or relearn. A little nudge never hurt. And the result is that you will look and sound smarter, even if all you write are emails and interoffice memos.

Feld approaches this tricky wicket subject with a great deal of common sense. She writes, "Grammar is full of rules. Those rules are like a recipe we can follow so we can be sure to create exactly the dish we had in mind, even if we're not master chefs." If you forgot or never learned the basics, this book will have you caught up quickly and painlessly.

Some of my favorite parts that I would like to hand out to many people (who will go unnamed here so I don't offend anyone!):
• Find out how to tell the difference between "lie" and "lay" so you never use either one incorrectly again. In addition to often being mixed up with one another, both words have more than one meaning so it really is tricky.

• Learn out why you never create a plural by adding an apostrophe s. When it's plural, it's cookies, not cookie's. (After all, it's plural, not possessive.)

• Figure out the difference between commonly mixed-up words, including effect and affect, accept and except, advise and advice, every day and everyday, and many more.

• Learn how to use the subjunctive mood, which can radically change the verb form—so it may sound wrong to you, but it's right. If you do this correctly, you can crown yourself grammar royalty. Here's a hint. These sentences use the subjunctive mood: She wishes she were an expert predictor of earthquakes. If only he were a more adventurous person, he would join the ice-climbing expedition.

The final chapters focus on punctuation and specific and smart ways to make your writing better.

Each chapter also contains fun FAQs, a summary called "In a Nutshell," and a three-question quiz. At the end of the book, you can test your knowledge with a more comprehensive quiz. Best of all, when you finish reading this cover-to-cover, which I highly recommend, you will have a handy desk reference for checking on something you just want to quickly verify.

This is a well-written and quick grammar guide that will have a stunning effect (not affect): It will make you look and sound more professional and educated.

Bonus: Do check the end of the book for a list of printed book references, and more than two dozen online resources for grammar and punctuation.