The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

Few people today can write with the same authority on the English language as Bryan A. Garner. In this comprehensive work, he expands his popular and much-consulted chapter from the Chicago Manual of Style to cover not only grammar and usage but also syntax, word formation, and punctuation. The book offers advice and explanations for what constitutes standard literary Englishthe forms that mark writers and speakers as educated users of the languagealong with some historical context for understanding the development of these forms. Special features include a discussion of how the canonical parts of speech came to be identified, coverage of both traditional sentence diagramming and contemporary transformational grammar, and several dozen Google Ngrams illustrating how the usage of specific terms has evolved over the centuries of printed English books. The book concludes with an exhaustive glossary of grammatical terms and a bibliography of suggested readings. It is a magisterial work, the culmination of Garner s several decades of study of the English language.