Practical and fun, this dynamic guide for both student writers and English teachers dispenses quirky remedies—with a generous dose of humor—for sentences suffering from ailments such as detail deficiency, passive voice fatigue, weak verbs, and word overdose. Providing teachers with tools to improve middle and high school student writing, the lessons show how to write interesting sentences through samples of stellar sentences, practice exercises, and skill-boosting activities.

Written for the 1.8 million students who will take the SAT this year, this relatable study guide fuses the irreverent humor of The Onion with all the preparation prowess of The Official SAT Study Guide. Every year, almost 2 million students take the SAT exam, a test that will likely determine their college admissions, scholarship offers, and ultimately, what kind of cars they'll drive and how much money they'll make. To ensure that your child doesn't end up in a rusted-out Gremlin making less than $5.00 an hour, professional comedy writer and savant Charles Horn taps his talents to present an instructive test-taking tool that is as entertaining as it is educational. Using the same types of questions that appear on the actual exam, Horn rewrites his guide to make the questions timely, edgy, and fun. Instead of boring, politically correct textbook material, students will be engaged by questions covering stuff they actually might care about, like teen issues, Hollywood, and pop culture.

Grammar has finally let its hair down! Unlike uptight grammar books that overwhelm us with every single grammar rule, Kiss My Asterisk is like a bikini: it’s fun, flirty, and covers only the most important bits. Its lessons, which are 100 percent free of complicated grammar jargon, have been carefully selected to include today’s most common, noticeable errors—the ones that confuse our readers or make them wonder if we are, in fact, smarter than a fifth grader. What is the proper use of an apostrophe? When should an ellipsis be used instead of an em dash? Why do we capitalize President Obama but not “the president”? And why is that question mark placed outside of the end quote? Author Jenny Baranick is an English professor whose students can’t believe she’s actually that into grammar. Upon experiencing the joys of grammar at an early age, raising grammar awareness became Jenny’s raison d’être. By spreading her remarkably user-friendly and hilarious approach to grammar, she hopes everyone will experience the satisfaction of a properly placed comma, a precisely used semicolon, and a correctly deployed en dash. Kiss My Asterisk shows grammar as it’s never been seen before: uncomplicated, laugh-out-loud funny, and, dare we say, a little risqué.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Text, Speech, and Dialogue, TSD 2016, held in Brno, CzechRepublic, in September 2016. The 62 papers presented together with 3 abstracts of invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 127 submissions. They focus on topics such as corpora and language resources; speech recognition; tagging, classification and parsing of text and speech; speech and spoken language generation; semantic processing of text and speech; integrating applications of text and speech processing; automatic dialogue systems; as well as multimodal techniques and modelling.

Clarity and precision in legal writing are essential skills in the practice and study of law. This book offers a straightforward, practical guide to effective legal style from a world-leading expert. The book is thoughtfully structured to explain the elements of good legal writing and its most effective use. It catalogues all aspects of legal style, topic by topic, phrase by phrase, usage by usage. It scrutinises them all, suggesting improvements. Its 'dictionary' arrangement makes it easy to navigate. Topics range as widely as ambiguity, definitions, provisos, recitals, simplified outlines, terms of art, tone, and the various principles of legal interpretation. Words and phrases deal with legal expressions that non-lawyers find opaque and obscure. The purpose is to show that you can usually substitute a plain-English equivalent. Usage entries include matters such as abbreviations, acronyms, active and passive voice, brackets, bullet points, citation methods, cross-referencing, deeds, fonts, document design, footnotes, gender-neutral language, numbering systems, plain language, punctuation, the use of Latin, structures for legal advices and documents, and techniques for editing and proofreading. With an emphasis on technical effectiveness and understanding, the book is required reading for all those engaged in the practice and study of law.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 27th China Conference on Information Retrieval, CCIR 2021, held in Dalian, China, in October 2021. The 15 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 124 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections: search and recommendation, NLP for IR, IR in Education, and IR in Biomedicine.

The first international handbook to bring the areas of reasoning,judgment and decision making together, now in paperback format. The book brings three of the important topics of thinkingtogether - reasoning, judgment and decision making â?? anddiscusses key issues in each area. The studies described range fromthose that are purely laboratory based to those that involveexperts making real world judgments, in areas such as medical andlegal decision making and political and economic forecasting. * International collection of original chapters by leadingresearchers in the field * Several chapters contain important new theoreticalperspectives * Paperback version is more affordable for individualresearchers