Overview

Any living language is a growing, flexible instrument with rules that are constantly changing by virtue of the way it is used by its live, independent speakers and writers. Only the rules of a dead language are unalterably fixed.

Nevertheless, at any point in a language's development, certain conventions of usage are in force. Certain constructions are considered to be errors that mark the person who uses them as uneducated. It is with these conventions and errors that this handbook primarily deals. We also include a section on sexist usage.

To make the handbook easy to use as a reference, we have arranged the topics covered in alphabetical order. Each convention and error dealt with has an abbreviated reference tag. The tags are reproduced on the back endpapers, along with some of the more important proofreading symbols. If you are in a college writing course, your instructor may use some combination of these tags and symbols to indicate revisions needed in your reports.

Abbreviations
Acronyms
Apostrophe
Brackets
Capitalization
Colon
Comma
Dangling Modifier
Dash
Diction
Ellipsis
Exclamation Point
Fragmentary Sentence
Hyphen
Italicization
Misplaced Modifier
Numbers
Parallelism
Parentheses
Period
Pronoun Antecedent Agreement
Pronoun Form
Question Mark
Quotation Marks
Run-On Sentence
Semicolon
Sexist Usage
Spelling Error
Verb Form
Verb Subject Agreement

ab Abbreviations

Every scientific and professional field generates hundreds of specialized terms, and many of these terms are abbreviated for the sake of conciseness and simplicity. A few principles for the use of abbreviations follow, the first probably being the most important:

• As...