Introduction 1 Part 1: Mastering the Basics 7 Chapter 1: Tailoring Language to Suit Your Audience and Purpose 9 Chapter 2: Noticing Nouns and Perfecting Pronouns 17 Chapter 3: Getting Acquainted with Verbs 31 Chapter 4: Writing Good or Well: Adjectives and Adverbs 47 Chapter 5: Packing Plenty of Power: Prepositions, Conjunctions, and Interjections 63 Part 2: Creating Correct Sentences 73 Chapter 6: Digging Deeper into Verb Tense 75 Chapter 7: Tackling Subjects, Objects, and Complements 85 Chapter 8: Having It All: Writing Complete Sentences 99 Part 3: Perfecting Punctuation and Capitalization 113 Chapter 9: Catching Up on Apostrophes, Hyphens, and Dashes 115 Chapter 10: Pausing to Consider the Comma 129 Chapter 11: "Can I Quote You on That?" Quotation Marks 145 Chapter 12: Hitting the Big Time: Capital Letters 155 Part 4: Grammar in Action 165 Chapter 13: Texting, Emailing, and Posting 167 Chapter 14: Stacking Ideas: Numbered Steps and Bulleted Lists 179 Chapter 15: Writing at School and at Work 191 Part 5: Getting the Details Right 201 Chapter 16: Taming Tricky Words 203 Chapter 17: Avoiding Common Mistakes 215 Chapter 18: Sharpening Your Verb Skills 231 Chapter 19: Mastering Picky Pronouns and Avoiding Confusing Comparisons 245 Chapter 20: Putting the Right Letters in the Right Place: Spelling 255 Index 269.