Book List for Editing

Punctuation and grammar come easily to me. I remember rules from elementary school, can recite a whole list of prepositions, and can use a semi-colon with confidence. For those times that I’m stumped about comma placement or which word to choose, I have a few go-to reference books that help me out every time.

Strunk and White’s, The Elements of Style, is a small book packed with information. Chapters include Elementary Rules of Usage, Elementary Principles of Composition, A Few Matters of Form, Words and Expressions Commonly Misused, and my edition, the third, has a chapter called An Approach To Style. This potent little package should sit on every writer’s desk within easy reach.

I also use The McGraw-Hill College Handbook. It lists prepositions and conjunctive adverbs, shows how to fix dangling modifiers, and explains parallelism and subjunctive tense. This book isn’t the only one that can help with problems, but it’s the one I have. You probably have an English handbook left over from your college days. Check your book shelves.

Three other books that I’d recommend as references are Renni Browne and Dave King’s, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Revision and Self-Editing for Publication by James Scott Bell, and Gary Provost’s, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing. These are helpful books writers should read and reread as often as possible.

All these books are good references, but I’ll be here to help, too. In each post, I’ll show the correct usage of a punctuation or grammar rule and try to explain the reason behind it.

Let me know if you have a question you want to see addressed. Thanks for your imput!