The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style

This authoritative survey of English usage, grammar, and style offers guidance on almost any writing problem imaginable. Arranged in a single, easy-to-use A–Z list, the guide’s 1,500 entries include examples and quotations that show not only correct and incorrect usage but also the relative effectiveness of different expressions in context.

The guide also presents the opinions of the American Heritage® Usage Panel—a group of two hundred prominent writers, scholars, and scientists—who are polled on traditional and emerging usage problems. The panel makes clear when attitudes about a word are changing, when old chestnuts have been laid to rest, and when today’s innovations are likely to become tomorrow’s standards.

This book confronts traditional bugbears, such as disinterested and lay vs. lie, along with a variety of new challenges, such as seeking closure and begging the question. Commonly confused words, such as impinge and infringe, are teased apart. Notes on science terms explain the difference between popular and technical uses of words like relativity and exponential growth. Rulings are given for tough calls on grammatical controversies, redundancy, and parallelism, and sensible guidance is provided on punctuation, capitalization, and other conventions of style. Both readable and well researched, this book is an eminently sensible source of advice on how to use words effectively.