Grammar Books for Writers

This week I was hanging out in the Twitter writing chat (@StoryDam; Thursdays, 8 pm EST) when Renee TennisMcKinley (@2old2tap) asked if anyone could recommend grammar books for writers. Since I co-own a writing tutoring center, I decided to jump in the grammar fray and offer some book suggestions.

The good news is that these books don’t have to cost you much (with one exception) because, you know, the starving-writer-in-the-garret-with-frayed-cuffs trope didn’t become a cliche for nothing. Most grammar guides are fairly timeless and will serve you as well ten years from now as they did ten years ago. For that reason, you don’t need the latest edition; a used copy works wonderfully (and an old book has the added benefit of adding that sought-after ambiance to your garret shelf).

I trawled through the dozen or so grammar books at the writing center and came up with these:

Grammar Smart from The Princeton Review

This slim volume (203 pages) is easy to use with clear sections and humorous, tongue-in-cheek examples. You’ll find mini lessons on punctuation, parts of speech, and logical sentence construction, followed by short drills and quizzes with an answer key in the back. This book is perfect if you’re a little grammar-phobic and don’t know where to start. The above link takes you to the Amazon page where you can buy Grammar Smart starting at $0.01 plus shipping.

English Grammar by David Daniels & Barbara Daniels

English Grammar (276 pages) shares features with Grammar Smart, but English Grammar is more technical. For instance, there’s a section on sentence patterns so you can practice your sentence variety by plugging in word values. Is it hanged or hung? Wreaked or wrought? English Grammar provides extensive verb tense charts with irregular verbs in simple past, past perfect, future progressive…you get the idea. As you learn, you can test your skills with 139 exercises. Like Grammar Smart, English Grammar can be had by you (passive voice, anyone?) for a mere $0.01 plus shipping.

The Holt Handbook, second edition

Everyone needs a hefty grammar reference book for those times when you’re thinking, Should I be using conditional tense? Oh, if I were Queen… Or you wake up in a sweat wondering if you have a faulty complement. Tipping the scales at 2.5 pounds and 775 pages, The Holt Handbook is a real heavyweight. I especially love Chapter 10: “Writing Concise Sentences” with separate segments for deadwood, utility words, and circumlocution. My students often have problems with wordiness, so we use the practice paragraphs in this chapter. There are more recent editions of this book (I think they’re up to the sixth now), but I love this one with the friendly owl on the cover, which you can pick up for $5.74.

Now, a bonus book for academic writers:

The Little, Brown Compact Handbook, ninth edition

This is a fantastic resource I discovered when I started taking college courses in preparation for my MFA program. If you need to know how to write parenthetical citations in a variety of formats, The Little, Brown Handbook contains easy-to-find tabs for MLA, APA, Chicago, etc. In fact, the instructions for following MLA format in Little, Brown are much easier to understand than in the official MLA handbook, so I always turn here first. Little, Brown also provides tips for doing research and avoiding fallacies as well as information on when to use an em dash, a colon, or a comma. If you are a technical or academic writer, you should not buy this book used (unless you happen to find the latest edition second-hand) as policies and formats change. Unfortunately, that means you will need to shell out $82.79.

One funny grammar aside: when I first heard the name of this book, I didn’t know about the comma, so I thought it was The Little Brown Compact Handbook. I was disappointed to discover that although the handbook was comparatively little, it was not brown. And it all goes to show, commas do matter.

But you already knew that.

So, fellow writers and grammar enthusiasts, what did I leave out? What are your favorite grammar books for writers? Do tell!