Links About Grammar

Holy Mother Grammatica's Guide To Good Writing is a classic in the fanfiction community. So classic that many sites include a full copy of it. Near as I can tell, this is the real one, since it also has fanfiction by the author. Humourous, modern, and American. It also covers things like plot and characterization.

The Writer's Block is a Canadian guide. Canadian? Wow! Canadian grammar is a minefield, seeing as we don't have a definitive guide. We stumble through with guides written for specific fields, and whatever our boss was taught. This site covers some of the differences, so you can make an educated guess.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss is the grammar book that became a best-seller. It's not terribly useful as a guide. It's not well-enough organized and it's incomplete. What it does do is show, using humourous examples, what can happen if you get things too wrong. It also goes through the evolution of grammar, and shows some rules that have changed in the last 20 years. Changed in last 20 years? By the time I figure it out, it will have changed! Not exactly; the rules that count are fixed, it's only the minor ones that change.

Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is a classic. Strunk started it with a little book covering his pet peeves, and White (author of Charlotte's Web) expanded on it. This link goes to their combined work, not sure which edition. These are the guys who said that you must know the rules in order to break them effectively, and break them they do.

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