It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences

Acknowledgments ix   Introduction The Sentence: The Writer’s Most Important Tool 1   Chapter 1  Who Cares? Making Sentences Meaningful to Your Reader 7   Chapter 2 Conjunctions That Kill: Subordination 15   Chapter 3 Movable Objects: Understanding Phrases and Clauses 29   Chapter 4 Size Matters: Short versus Long Sentences 36   Chapter 5  Words Gone Wild: Sentences That Say Nothing—or Worse 53   Chapter 6 Words Gone Mild: Choosing Specific Words Over Vague Ones 61   Chapter 7 A Frequently Overstated Case: The Truth About Adverbs 65   Chapter 8 Are Your Relatives Essential? Relative Clauses 72   Chapter 9 Antique Desk Suitable for Lady with Thick Legs and Large Drawers: Prepositional Phrases 80   Chapter 10 Dangler Danger: Participles and Other Danglers 85   Chapter 11 The Writing Was Ignored by the Reader: Passives 90   Chapter 12 You Will Have Been Conjugating: Other Matters of Tense 98   Chapter 13 The Being and the Doing Are the Killing of Your Writing: Nominalizations 107   Chapter 14 The The: Not-So-Definite Definite Articles 112   Chapter 15 The Writer and His Father Lamented His Ineptitude: Unclear Antecedents 116   Chapter 16 To Know Them Is to Hating Them: Faulty and Funky Parallels 122   Chapter 17 Taking the Punk Out of Punctuation: The Problem with Semicolons and Parentheses 125   Chapter 18 You Don’t Say: Descriptive Quotation Attributions 131   Chapter 19 Trimming the Fat: Expressions That Weigh Down Your Sentences 134   Chapter 20 The Major Overhaul: Streamlining Even the Most Problematic Sentences 149   Chapter 21 On Breaking the “Rules”: Knowing When to Can the Canons 164   Appendix 1 Grammar for Writers 167 Appendix 2 Punctuation Basics for Writers 191 Appendix 3 The Deadliest Catches: The Most Incriminating Errors and How to Avoid Them 204   About the Author 208 Index 209