Stellar English : a down-to-earth guide to grammar and style / Frank L. Cioffi.

"A handy, bare essentials, pocket guide to "formal" written English for students, scholars, and writers in need of a reference to sharpen their ability to write with clarity and credibility"-- Provided by publisher.

"An indispensable guide to essential principles of English grammar and usage Stellar English lays out the fundamentals of effective writing, from word choice and punctuation to parts of speech and common errors. Frank Cioffi emphasizes how formal written English-though only a subdialect of the language-enables writers to reach a wide and heterogenous audience. Cioffi's many example sentences illustrating grammatical principles tilt in an otherworldly direction, making up a science fiction story involving alien invasion. Reading the book through will not only help you with your grammar but also reveal how the story ends!An invaluable brief handbook for native and nonnative speakers alike, Stellar English avoids the jargon and emphasis on outdated rules found in typical grammar guides and shows how good writing uses carefully constructed language that's at once appropriate to an audience and communicates-without distractions or confusion-just what the writer wants"-- Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Sentence-level issues : Fragments -- Sentence-level issues : Run-ons and subject-verb agreement -- Verbs -- Nouns and pronouns -- Modifiers : adjectives -- Modifiers : adverbs -- Predeterminers, central determiners, and postdeterminers -- Varieties of definiteness, or more essentials of the and a/an -- Semicolons, hyphens, and other baffling punctuation marks -- A special case : commas -- Creating understandable sentences : metaphoric language, parallelism, jargon, slang, and clichés -- Word-level issues -- Consequentiality.