From the creator of the New York Times dialect quiz that ignited conversations about how and why we say the words we say, a stunning and delightful exploration of American language. Did you know that your answers to just a handful of questions can...

The definitive guide to getting your way, revised and updated with new material on writing, speaking, framing, and other key tools for arguing more powerfully “Cross Cicero with David Letterman and you get Jay Heinrichs.”—Joseph Ellis, Pulitzer...

Why are Emily Dickinson and Henry James drawn habitually to dashes? What makes James Baldwin such a fan of commas, which William Carlos Williams tends to ignore? And why do that odd couple, the novelist Virginia Woolf and the short story specialist Andre...

Six biographers describe what they learned about biography while working on the lives of Truman, Adams, Dickinson, Lippmann, Alice James, and Lyndon Johnson

A biography of two troublesome words.Isn't it ironic? Or is it? Never mind, I'm just being sarcastic (or am I?). Irony and sarcasm are two of the most misused, misapplied, and misunderstood words in our conversational lexicon. In this volume in the MIT...

A thorough, accessible guide to research, citation, and source evaluation, designed to assist students growing up in an era of social media, fake news, alternative facts, and information overload. Is Yahoo Answers a good source for your History essay?...

From the former New York Times Op-Ed page editor, a definitive and entertaining resource for writers of every stripe on the neglected art of persuasion. In the tradition of The Elements of Style comes Trish Hall’s essential new work on writing well―a...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A sharp, funny grammar guide they’ll actually want to read, from Random House’s longtime copy chief and one of Twitter’s leading language gurus NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • Paste • Shelf...

Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fifth Edition, presents the best a college dictionary can offer, with all the user-friendly qualities that have distinguished the Webster’s New World name for decades. A clear and accessible defining style,...

An award-winning poet, teacher, and “champion of poetry” (New York Times) demystifies the elusive element of voice. In this accessible and distilled craft guide, acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland approaches poetry through the frame of poetic voice, that...

“One of the most satisfying accounts of a great passion that I have ever read.” ―Vivian Gornick, New York Times Book ReviewMary Norris, The New Yorker’s Comma Queen and best-selling author of Between You & Me, has had a lifelong love affair with words...

“Wow. No one ever told me this!” Wendy Laura Belcher has heard this countless times throughout her years of teaching and advising academics on how to write journal articles. Scholars know they must publish, but few have been told how to do so. So Belcher...

English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn’t speak it―only one in five people does. Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world’s 7.4 billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than...

The Screenwriter s Bible's 7th edition marks the 25th anniversary of one of the most popular, authoritative, and useful books on screenwriting. A standard by which other screenwriting books are measured, it has sold over 340,000 copies in its 25-year...