Garner's Modern English Usage

Bryan Garner is the most trusted living usage expert of our day, and Garner's Modern English Usage is the preeminent guide to the effective use of the English language. With well over 6,000 entries on English grammar, syntax, word choice, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and style, this book is adored by professional writers and general readers alike (David Foster Wallace famously wrote a 62-page review that appeared in his collectionConsider the Lobster, calling its author "a genius").

In this major update to a timeless classic, Bryan Garner has dramatically expanded coverage of international English usage, making it for the first time a guide not only to American English usage, but to English usage globally.

This expansion is important because interest in the English language is greater than ever; English is the lingua franca not only of higher education and academia, but of science, business, computing, aviation, and, arguably, entertainment. It is the most common language worldwide, spoken by anywhere from 1.5 to 2 billion people, and the most commonly taught foreign language. An awareness of global English is what matters today. To ensure that Bryan Garner's clear, unambiguous advice resonates with English-speakers worldwide, more than 2,000 entries have been revised to account for the nuances of English not only in the United States, but in Australia and New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Canada, and South Africa.

Not everything has changed: readers will still find the popular "Garner's Language-Change Index" which registers where each disputed usage in modern English falls on a five-stage continuum from nonacceptability (to the language community as a whole) to acceptability, giving the book a consistent standard throughout. Bryan Garner's tools for scientific accuracy have, however, improved; this fourth edition benefits from usage data generated by Google Ngrams, which charts frequencies of any word or short sentence in sources printed after 1800.

With thousands of concise entries, longer essays on problematic areas such as subject-verb agreement and danglers, and meticulous citations of theNew York Times, Newsweek, and other leading journalistic sources for examples both good and bad,Garner's Modern English Usage provides priceless reference information to anyone hoping to improve as a writer - worldwide.

A best-selling legal author with more than a dozen titles to his credit, Bryan Garner is also the editor-in-chief of Black's Law Dictionary in all of its current editions. He has taught at numerous law schools, and is the president of LawProse, Inc., a Dallas-based company that provides writing and drafting seminars to lawyers and judges throughout the United States.