This book addresses people who write all the time but are not exactly sure if they write well. As the book’s title suggests, clean well-lighted sentences with logic and agreement between its parts are more than ever needed in any profession to make any writer’s meaning clear.

Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences: A Writer's Guide to Avoiding the Most Common Errors in Grammar and Punctuation is a simple but focused grammar book unlike those with comprehensive texts and fancy terms. Although the writer had to use some terminology here and there, due to the precise tips and the sense of humor in expressing them, the writing is not boring.

The book starts with the concise explanations of familiar grammar terminology, continues with noun and pronoun cases, subject-verb, noun-pronoun agreements, verb tenses, usage and moods, modifiers, connectives, and punctuation. The book has seven chapters, and at the end of each chapter, offers a quiz and on the following page answers to the quiz. The language is direct and very easily understandable. Even a writer who is the least informed in grammar cannot help write better and more clearly, if he can keep this book on his desk.

The detailed contents in the beginning and the complete index at the end of this 176 page book can facilitate anyone’s search faster than the heavier volumes of grammar books writers usually get lost in.

making sure any text is written in clear, concise manner without any grammar or usage mistakes.

the small volume and the direct approach in explanation, and also the examples given with each explanation.

Janis Bell (as is written on the book's inside back jacket) is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University, where her graduate studies focused on the teaching of writing. An English Professor and writing consultant in the San Francisco Bay area since 1973, she teaches writing and grammar in Golden Gate University.

I have quite a few grammar books on my shelf, but none of them are as direct and focused as this book.

Interested in buying this? Support Writing.Com by making your purchase of Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences: A Guide to Avoiding the Most Common Errors in Grammar and Punctuation   from Amazon.Com!

Created May 23, 2009 at 10:53pm • Submit your own review...