“A useful reference [and] a fun read, chock-full of telling examples and pop-culture references.” —Charles Euchner, author of Keep It Short Most of us are not poets or novelists, but we are all writers. We email, text, and post; we craft memos and reports, menus and outdoor signage, birthday cards and sticky notes on the fridge. And just as we should think before we speak, we need to think before we write. Get a Grip on Your Grammar is a grammar book for those who hate grammar books, a writing resource filled with quick answers and a playful style—not endless, indecipherable grammar jargon. Designed for student, business, and creative-writing audiences alike, its easily digestible writing tips will finally teach you: • How to keep “lay” and “lie” straight • The proper usage of “backup” versus “back up” • Where to put punctuation around quotation marks • The meaning of “e.g.” versus “i.e.” • The perils of overusing the word “suddenly” • Why apostrophes should not be thrown about like confetti and 244 more great tips

How to Get a Grip on Grammar is packed full of amazing activities to get your grammar skills up to speed! Have fun with terrific tenses, awesome adverbs and super sentence structure! For useful tips and inspiring ideas, How to Get a Grip on Grammar is jam packed full of outrageous activities that will have you mastering the world of grammar in no time!

Unable to believe their father died while climbing Mount Denali, twelve-year-old Lily and her older sister, Sophie, climb the mountain in order to rescue him.

When their Ukrainian grandmother is lost on a trans-Atlantic Flight, two sisters are swept into a quest across eastern Europe to find the woman who had always told more tales than truths. From Poland to Slovakia to Hungary and beyond, Larissa and Ira navigate the steps of Ukrainian folk dance, the cliff-side paths of Slovak Paradise National Park, and the stark realities of war, folktales, and feminism, all for the sake of chasing who they're starting to believe is a true Baba Yaga. Understanding their family's roots has never been more clear. The setting's mythic properties drift like ghosts in the humid air, hinting of the folktales the sisters whisper like codes of bravery. The nesting dolls they discover reveal how each woman becomes stronger when tucked one, within another, within another-forgetting lies and truths to seize upon history, love, and the familial traditions that have shaped them into who they are together. Author and professional editor Kris Spisak has been spotlighted in Writer's Digest and The Huffington Post for her work to helping other writers. Her previous non-fiction books include Get a Grip on Your Grammar: 250 Writing and Editing Reminders for the Curious or Confused, The Novel Editing Workbook, and The Family Story Workbook. Spisak's background and her own family experience in the Ukrainian diaspora add weight to her fiction debut.

This book is a timely go-to resource for any professionals wishing to communicate with the growing number of readers whose first language is not English. It highlights the potential language difficulties these readers face, and provides guidelines and tools for overcoming them. The guidelines show how to convey complicated information clearly without affecting the integrity of the subject matter, while the practical ‘before’ and ‘after’ examples clearly illustrate how using these guidelines and improves scientific texts. The book also includes text evaluation tools that allow writers to rapidly assess the readability of their materials. It is based on theory and the authors’ extensive experience in producing highly readable English texts for L2 readers who struggle with materials that were originally prepared for L1 readers.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • For anyone who wants to learn a foreign language, this is the method that will finally make the words stick. “A brilliant and thoroughly modern guide to learning new languages.”—Gary Marcus, cognitive psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero At thirty years old, Gabriel Wyner speaks six languages fluently. He didn’t learn them in school—who does? Rather, he learned them in the past few years, working on his own and practicing on the subway, using simple techniques and free online resources—and here he wants to show others what he’s discovered. Starting with pronunciation, you’ll learn how to rewire your ears and turn foreign sounds into familiar sounds. You’ll retrain your tongue to produce those sounds accurately, using tricks from opera singers and actors. Next, you’ll begin to tackle words, and connect sounds and spellings to imagery rather than translations, which will enable you to think in a foreign language. And with the help of sophisticated spaced-repetition techniques, you’ll be able to memorize hundreds of words a month in minutes every day. This is brain hacking at its most exciting, taking what we know about neuroscience and linguistics and using it to create the most efficient and enjoyable way to learn a foreign language in the spare minutes of your day.

A testament to inspirational women throughout literature, Erin Blakemore’s exploration of classic heroines and their equally admirable authors shows today’s women how to best tap into their inner strengths and live life with intelligence, grace, vitality and aplomb. This collection of unforgettable characters—including Anne Shirley, Jo March, Scarlett O’Hara, and Jane Eyre—and outstanding authors—like Jane Austen, Harper Lee, and Laura Ingalls Wilder—is an impassioned look at literature’s most compelling heroines, both on the page and off. Readers who found inspiration in books by Toni Morrison, Maud Hart Lovelace, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Alice Walker, or who were moved by literary-themed memoirs like Shelf Discovery and Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, get ready to return to the well of women’s classic literature with The Heroine's Bookshelf.

"A lyrical, monumental work of fact and imagination." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Arrogance and innocence, hubris and hope — twenty-four haunting voices of the Titanic tragedy, as well as the iceberg itself, are evoked in a stunning tour de force. Slipping in telegraphs, undertaker’s reports, and other records, poet Allan Wolf offers a breathtaking, intimate glimpse at the lives behind the tragedy, told with clear-eyed compassion and astounding emotional power.

The basic rules governing the use of periods, semicolons, hyphens, commas, and other punctuation marks are illustrated by original explanations and humorous sample sentences. Reprint.