Books about Rhetoric from Amazon.com



The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition
Composition teachers throughout the English-speaking world have been pushing this book on their students since it was first published in 1957. Co-author White later revised it, and it remains the most compact and lucid handbook we have for matters of basic principles of composition, grammar, word usage and misusage, and writing style..
Price: $4.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]


Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
Are you a fool for mnemonics? If so, you'll fall head over nubucks for Mignon Fogarty--a.k.a. the Grammar Girl--and her handy new audio guide to writing and speaking well. It's chock-full of smart little anecdotes and memory tricks for felling the most common grammatical foes (who can ever remember the difference between "nauseous" and "nauseated" anyway?) and at just an hour long it's the perfect turn-to resource for students and professionals alike. I didn't try too hard to stump Grammar Girl in our Q&A, but with her eagle eyes she spotted my grammatical (typographical?) misstep without missing a beat! --Anne Bartholomew

Questions for the Grammar Girl

Amazon.com: Now that we communicate so often via e-mail and text messaging, do you think that people have become more desensitized to poor grammar, or in your experience is awareness more heightened as a result?

Grammar Girl: The average person seems to have become more desensitized to poor grammar, but language lovers seem to be tormented by the flood of mutilated e-mail and text messages—at least a lot of the people I hear from seem to be tormented. It might be a self-selecting group. To use one of my father's favorite phrases, language lovers seem to feel as though they are "being pecked to death by a duck."

Amazon.com: Your weekly podcast helps millions of listeners use good grammar and write more effectively. Do you think there is more value in learning by listening, as compared to reading and practical exercise?

Grammar Girl: Perhaps it's ironic, but I have a hard time learning by just listening. I need to read things, which is one of the reasons why I provide full transcripts for all my audio podcasts on the Grammar Girl Web site. People learn in different ways, so those who want to listen can listen, and those who want to read can read.

In my experience, nothing beats practical exercise. I often have to look up grammar rules over and over again because I can't remember them, but once I've written a show about a rule, I always remember it.

Amazon.com: Have the grammar mnemonics you've developed come easily to you? Which ones were the toughest to capture in an easy-to-remember tip?

Grammar Girl: Some mnemonics come easily and some don't. I had a hard time coming up with a way for people to remember the difference between "its" and "it's," and I ended up using a really complicated story about a dream I had involving the eBay "it" advertising campaign.

I think the best mnemonics are the simple ones. Remembering that you should say "different from" instead of "different than" because "different" has two f's and "from" starts with an f isn't awfully creative, but it's easy to remember.

Amazon.com: Is there a grammar rule that even Grammar Girl finds it hard to remember?

Grammar Girl: There are so many that it's hard to pick just one! I have a notoriously terrible memory, which is why I'm always making up mnemonics.

Often I find that when I can't remember something it's because it is a style issue instead of a hard-and-fast rule, so different people do it differently and there is no "right" answer. For example, I always have to look up the rules about whether the verb should be singular or plural after collective nouns like "team" and phrases like "the couple" and "one of the people who."

But when I look up the rule for collective nouns, I am reminded that the "rule" is that you have to just decide whether your collective noun has a sense of being a group or a sense of being many individuals. (And then there are also differences between British and American English.)

It's even worse with a phrase like "one of the people who": experts are split over whether the verb should be singular or plural. There really isn't an answer; you just have to pick a side. I have a hard time making a mnemonic for something like that!

Amazon.com: It used to be that proper grammar and thoughtful wording were the defining factors of a good piece of writing. Increasingly, however, writing is prized for the speed with which it is produced and not necessarily the craft. How can conscientious writers find the happy medium between form and efficiency?

Grammar Girl: What, didn't I answer your questions fast enough?

But seriously, I don't think I've come in contact with the people who value speed. As a Web editor, I certainly wasn't happy when people turned in bad writing, even if they turned it in early. And when I was writing magazine articles or corporate materials for a living I never felt rushed (except when I waited too long to get started).

The places where I do feel a sense of urgency are in e-mail and messaging; people seem to expect immediate responses. But writing a high-quality message doesn't take much more time than writing a careless message; it just takes more focus.

Amazon.com: Bonus question: I wrote all these questions with no more than a cursory grammar and spelling check. How did I do?

Grammar Girl: I found only one major error, and I changed the text to bold. It looked like a typo rather than an error in your understanding of the rules. Good job!

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Price: $7.87 [Notify me when price goes down.]


A Writer's Reference
Having helped nearly 3 million students at 1600 colleges and universities to write well, A Writer’s Reference succeeds because it has always been grounded in classroom experience. Nearly twenty years ago, Diana Hacker reinvented the college handbook by looking at her own students’ needs. She crafted a first-of-its-kind reference that offered practical solutions to college writing problems in a language students could understand and in a format that was easy for them to use. Her many innovations — hand-edited sentences, grammar checker boxes, student-friendly index entries, ESL coverage, and a lay-flat comb binding — have been widely imitated but never improved upon.

In the Hacker tradition, the new contributing authors — Nancy Sommers, Tom Jehn, Jane Rosenzweig, and Marcy Carbajal Van Horn — have crafted solutions for the writing problems of today’s college students. Together they give us a new edition that provides more help with academic writing and that works better for a wider range of multilingual students.

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Price: $44.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]


On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (On Writing Well)
Whether you write an occasional professional letter or a daily newspaper column, William Zinsser's On Writing Well should be required reading. Simplicity is Zinsser's mantra: he preaches a stripped-down writing style, strong and clear. He has no patience for excess (most use of adjectives and adverbs, he writes, just adds clutter) or tired phraseology (for instance, he'd like to outlaw all leads involving those "future archaeologists" most often found "stumbl[ing] upon the remains of our civilization"). He recommends that all writers of nonfiction read their work aloud (don't commit something to paper that you wouldn't actually say) and write under the assumption that "the reader knows nothing" (not to be confused with assuming the reader's an idiot). In addition to the chapters on the expected--usage, audience, interviews, leads--Zinsser also focuses on such trouble spots as science and technical writing, business writing, sports, and humor..
Price: $7.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]


The Elements of Style Illustrated
The only style manual ever to appear on bestseller lists has explained to millions of readers the basic principles of plain English The book’s mantra—make every word tell—is still on point. Whether seventeen or seventy, this much-loved classic, now in its fourth edition, will forever be the go-to guide when in need of a hint on how to make a turn of phrase clearer, or a reminder on how to enliven prose with the active voice. Kalman’s exquisite illustrations give the revered work a jolt of new energy, making the learning experience more colorful and clear. The Elements of Style Illustrated will come to be known as the definitive, must-have edition..
Price: $8.68 [Notify me when price goes down.]


How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing
All students and professors need to write, and many struggle to finish their stalled dissertations, journal articles, book chapters, or grant proposals Writing is hard work and can be difficult to wedge into a frenetic academic schedule. In this practical, lighthearted and encouraging book, Paul J Silvia explains that writing productively doesnot require innate skills or special traits but specific tactics and actions. Drawing examples from his own field: psychology, he shows readers how to overcome motivational roadblocks and become prolific without sacrificing evenings, weekends and vactions. After describing strategies for writing productively, the author gives advise from the trenches on how to write, submit, revise, and resubmit articles: how to improve writing quality; and how to write and publish academic work..
Price: $8.78 [Notify me when price goes down.]


A Rulebook for Arguments
Updated examples, streamlined text, and the chapter on definition reworked in a rule-based format strengthen this already strong volume. Readers familiar with the previous edition will find a text that retains all the features that make Rulebook ideally suited for use as a supplementary course book-including its modest price and compact size.

Unlike most textbooks on argumentative writing, Rulebook is organized around specific rules, illustrated and explained soundly and briefly. It is not a textbook, but a rulebook, whose goal is to help students get on with writing a paper or assessing an argument..
Price: $5.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]



They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing
At a time when so many lament the decline of writing skills among Americans, They Say/I Say teaches the core moves of effective argumentative writing. Suggesting that there are certain moves that experienced writers use instinctively, and that the moves can be learned, this book offers a number of imaginative templates for doing so. Praised for "demystifying the tricks of the writer's trade," They Say/I Say grows from Gerald Graff's award-winning Clueless in Academe..
Price: $13.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]


The Elements of Style: The Original Edition
This classic reference is a must-have for any student or writer. In this brief handbook, Strunk identifies the principal requirements of proper American English style and concentrates on the most often violated rules of composition. Authoritative and engagingly written, this is simply the greatest book of its kind.
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Price: $1.59 [Notify me when price goes down.]


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