I am initiating this thread with intention to help you learn/improve English. Though, I myself is not an expert but when it comes to suggesting books for learning/improving language that is where I can help you. If not much, then atleast little.
I will post introduction to the books which I find worth reading and helpful. These books will be related to grammer, vocabulary and ultimately English. You are also most welcome to share you books treasure with us.
That's enough for introduction.
Book 1:
Almost anyone can benefit by learning more about writing sentences. You don't have to be a student to benefit from this book; you just need the desire to write well. You must certainly want to create better sentences, or you would not be reading this page. If you already know how to write good, basic sentences but fell they still lack something, that they have no variety, no style, then this book is for you.
But how do you go about writing better sentences? The answer is simple. You learn to write better sentences as you learn almost every other skill: by imitating the examples of those who have the skill. You probably have already discovered that it is easier to master anything - jumping hurdles, doing a swan dive, or playing the guitar - if you imitate a model. Nowhere is this principle more obvious than in writing. If you are willing to improve your writing skills by copying models of clear sentences, the following five chapters will help you master the skill of writing well, with grace and style.
THE WHOLE IS THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
CHAPTER 1 briefly reviews what constitutes a sentence. If you need to review the functions of different parts of a sentence, you may need a supplementary book with a fuller discussion of sentence structure. This chapter covers the various parts of the sentence, utilizing the traditional terms you will find in the explanations of the patterns in CHAPTER 2
SKILL COMES FROM PRACTICE
CHAPTER 2, the heart of this book, contains twenty different sentence patterns, some with variations. Study the graphic picture of each pattern (the material in the numbered boxes) and notice the precise punctuation demanded for that pattern; you will then be able to imitate these different kinds of sentences. The explanation under each boxed pattern will further clarify HOW and WHEN you should use that particular pattern; the examples will give you models to imitate; the exercises will provide practice. With these as guides, try writing and revising until you master the skill of constructing better sentences.
As you revise, take some of your original sentences and rewrite them to fit a number of these patterns. This technique may at first seem too deliberate, too contrived an an attempt at an artificial style. Some of the sentences you create may not seem natural. But what may seem artificial at first will ultimately be the means to greater ease in writing with flair and style.
CLEAR WRITING COMES FROM REWRITING
Your first draft of any communication - letter, theme, report (either written or oral) - will almost always need revision. When you first try to express ideas, you are mainly interested in capturing your elusive thoughts, in making them concrete enough on a sheet of paper for you to think about them. An important step in the writing process - in fact, where writing really begins - is revision, an ongoing process. You must work deliberately to express your captured ideas in clear and graceful sentences.
COMBINATIONS LEAD TO ENDLESS VARIETY
CHAPTER 3 will give you some tips on style and show you how some of the basic twenty styling patterns in CHAPTER 2 can combine with other patterns. Study the examples given and described in CHAPTER 3; then let your imagination guide you to making effective combinations of the different patterns.
Analyze the sentences from professional writers to discover rhetorical subtleties and ways of achieving clarity, style, and variety.
IMAGINATION IS ONE CORNERSTONE OF STYLE
CHAPTER 4 will show you how to express your thoughts in imaginative, figurative language. Study the pattern for each figure of speech described there, and then insert an occasional one - simile, metaphor, analogy, allusion, personification, hyperbole - into your own writing. Or you might experiment with an ironical tone. Be original; never merely echo some well-known, ready-made cliché. Create new images from your own experiences.
UNDERSTANDING COMES FROM ANALYSIS
CHAPTER 5 contains excerpts from the works of experienced writers who have in incorporated patterns like the ones described. Study the marginal notes that give the pattern numbers you have learned from studying CHAPTER 2. Then analyze something you are reading; discover for yourself how writers handle their sentences and their sentences and their punctuation. Don't be afraid to imitate them when you write. You will, of course, find "patters" (arrangements of words in sentences) that are not in CHAPTER 2 of this book. Imitate others as well as the twenty we present.
Regards:zoniesh,
book 2
Review
"I was very excited when I was approached to review The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market. I was even more excited when it arrived and lived up to my hopes. The guide is both comprehensive and succinct, and best of all, is full of practical examples showing text before and after it has been disambiguated. That means there finally is the definitive resource that has been lacking in the field of writing and editing for an international audience." --Wendalyn Nichols, Editor of Copyediting newsletter and editorial trainer
"John R. Kohl's masterpiece, The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, translatable Documentation for a Global Market, is an indispensable and thoroughly usable set of recommendations and examples. By implementing the appropriate suggestions, every technical writer can now create translatable text that can be better understood by humans and better processed by machines. Terrific work." --Leif Sonstenes, Director Sales and Marketing, Locatech GmbH
"This guide is essential for anyone who creates technical content for global audiences. John Kohl has developed a resource that should be required reading for any manager, technical communicator, or editor involved with content that will be translated for or read by international audiences. As a technical communicator working overseas, I have spent dozens of hours creating guidance for writers who develop global content. With the publication of this book, I now have a thorough, go-to reference that covers all the issues of developing global content that the other style guides do not. This text will be put to use immediately to help my writers create and improve content for translation and publication throughout the world." --Eddie Hollon, Technical Communicator,Hansem EZUserGuides, Inc
Product Description
This detailed, example-driven guide illustrates how much you can do to make written texts more suitable for a global audience. Accompanied by an abundance of clearly explained examples, the Global English guidelines show you how to write documentation that is optimized for non-native speakers of English, translators, and even machine-translation software, as well as for native speakers of English. You'll find dozens of guidelines that you won't find in any other source, along with thorough explanations of why each guideline is useful. The author also includes revision strategies, as well as caveats that will help you avoid applying guidelines incorrectly.
Focusing primarily on sentence-level stylistic issues, problematic grammatical constructions, and terminology issues, this book addresses the following topics: ways to simplify your writing style and make it consistent; ambiguities that most writers and editors are not aware of, and how to eliminate those ambiguities; how to make your sentence structure more explicit so that your sentences are easier for native and non-native speakers to read and understand; punctuation and capitalization guidelines that improve readability and make translation more efficient; and howlanguage technologies such as controlled-authoring software can facilitate the adoption of Global English as a corporate standard.
This text is intended for anyone who uses written English to communicate technical information to a global audience. Technical writers, technical editors, science writers, and training instructors are just a few of the professions for which this book is essential reading. Even if producing technical information is not your primary job function, the Global English guidelines can help you communicate more effectively with colleagues around the world.
About the Author
John R. Kohl has worked at SAS Institute as a technical writer, technical editor, and linguistic engineer since 1992. For the past several years, John has devoted much of his time to terminology issues and to refining the Global English guidelines. As a linguistic engineer, John customizes and supports tools and processes that help make SAS documentation more consistent, easier to translate, and easier for non-native speakers of English to understand. John has been interested in machine translation and other language technologies for many years, and he is a charter member of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
I will post introduction to the books which I find worth reading and helpful. These books will be related to grammer, vocabulary and ultimately English. You are also most welcome to share you books treasure with us.
That's enough for introduction.
Book 1:
Introduction
(From Book)
(From Book)
Almost anyone can benefit by learning more about writing sentences. You don't have to be a student to benefit from this book; you just need the desire to write well. You must certainly want to create better sentences, or you would not be reading this page. If you already know how to write good, basic sentences but fell they still lack something, that they have no variety, no style, then this book is for you.
But how do you go about writing better sentences? The answer is simple. You learn to write better sentences as you learn almost every other skill: by imitating the examples of those who have the skill. You probably have already discovered that it is easier to master anything - jumping hurdles, doing a swan dive, or playing the guitar - if you imitate a model. Nowhere is this principle more obvious than in writing. If you are willing to improve your writing skills by copying models of clear sentences, the following five chapters will help you master the skill of writing well, with grace and style.
THE WHOLE IS THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
CHAPTER 1 briefly reviews what constitutes a sentence. If you need to review the functions of different parts of a sentence, you may need a supplementary book with a fuller discussion of sentence structure. This chapter covers the various parts of the sentence, utilizing the traditional terms you will find in the explanations of the patterns in CHAPTER 2
SKILL COMES FROM PRACTICE
CHAPTER 2, the heart of this book, contains twenty different sentence patterns, some with variations. Study the graphic picture of each pattern (the material in the numbered boxes) and notice the precise punctuation demanded for that pattern; you will then be able to imitate these different kinds of sentences. The explanation under each boxed pattern will further clarify HOW and WHEN you should use that particular pattern; the examples will give you models to imitate; the exercises will provide practice. With these as guides, try writing and revising until you master the skill of constructing better sentences.
As you revise, take some of your original sentences and rewrite them to fit a number of these patterns. This technique may at first seem too deliberate, too contrived an an attempt at an artificial style. Some of the sentences you create may not seem natural. But what may seem artificial at first will ultimately be the means to greater ease in writing with flair and style.
CLEAR WRITING COMES FROM REWRITING
Your first draft of any communication - letter, theme, report (either written or oral) - will almost always need revision. When you first try to express ideas, you are mainly interested in capturing your elusive thoughts, in making them concrete enough on a sheet of paper for you to think about them. An important step in the writing process - in fact, where writing really begins - is revision, an ongoing process. You must work deliberately to express your captured ideas in clear and graceful sentences.
COMBINATIONS LEAD TO ENDLESS VARIETY
CHAPTER 3 will give you some tips on style and show you how some of the basic twenty styling patterns in CHAPTER 2 can combine with other patterns. Study the examples given and described in CHAPTER 3; then let your imagination guide you to making effective combinations of the different patterns.
Analyze the sentences from professional writers to discover rhetorical subtleties and ways of achieving clarity, style, and variety.
IMAGINATION IS ONE CORNERSTONE OF STYLE
CHAPTER 4 will show you how to express your thoughts in imaginative, figurative language. Study the pattern for each figure of speech described there, and then insert an occasional one - simile, metaphor, analogy, allusion, personification, hyperbole - into your own writing. Or you might experiment with an ironical tone. Be original; never merely echo some well-known, ready-made cliché. Create new images from your own experiences.
UNDERSTANDING COMES FROM ANALYSIS
CHAPTER 5 contains excerpts from the works of experienced writers who have in incorporated patterns like the ones described. Study the marginal notes that give the pattern numbers you have learned from studying CHAPTER 2. Then analyze something you are reading; discover for yourself how writers handle their sentences and their sentences and their punctuation. Don't be afraid to imitate them when you write. You will, of course, find "patters" (arrangements of words in sentences) that are not in CHAPTER 2 of this book. Imitate others as well as the twenty we present.
Regards:zoniesh,
book 2
Review
"I was very excited when I was approached to review The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market. I was even more excited when it arrived and lived up to my hopes. The guide is both comprehensive and succinct, and best of all, is full of practical examples showing text before and after it has been disambiguated. That means there finally is the definitive resource that has been lacking in the field of writing and editing for an international audience." --Wendalyn Nichols, Editor of Copyediting newsletter and editorial trainer
"John R. Kohl's masterpiece, The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, translatable Documentation for a Global Market, is an indispensable and thoroughly usable set of recommendations and examples. By implementing the appropriate suggestions, every technical writer can now create translatable text that can be better understood by humans and better processed by machines. Terrific work." --Leif Sonstenes, Director Sales and Marketing, Locatech GmbH
"This guide is essential for anyone who creates technical content for global audiences. John Kohl has developed a resource that should be required reading for any manager, technical communicator, or editor involved with content that will be translated for or read by international audiences. As a technical communicator working overseas, I have spent dozens of hours creating guidance for writers who develop global content. With the publication of this book, I now have a thorough, go-to reference that covers all the issues of developing global content that the other style guides do not. This text will be put to use immediately to help my writers create and improve content for translation and publication throughout the world." --Eddie Hollon, Technical Communicator,Hansem EZUserGuides, Inc
Product Description
This detailed, example-driven guide illustrates how much you can do to make written texts more suitable for a global audience. Accompanied by an abundance of clearly explained examples, the Global English guidelines show you how to write documentation that is optimized for non-native speakers of English, translators, and even machine-translation software, as well as for native speakers of English. You'll find dozens of guidelines that you won't find in any other source, along with thorough explanations of why each guideline is useful. The author also includes revision strategies, as well as caveats that will help you avoid applying guidelines incorrectly.
Focusing primarily on sentence-level stylistic issues, problematic grammatical constructions, and terminology issues, this book addresses the following topics: ways to simplify your writing style and make it consistent; ambiguities that most writers and editors are not aware of, and how to eliminate those ambiguities; how to make your sentence structure more explicit so that your sentences are easier for native and non-native speakers to read and understand; punctuation and capitalization guidelines that improve readability and make translation more efficient; and howlanguage technologies such as controlled-authoring software can facilitate the adoption of Global English as a corporate standard.
This text is intended for anyone who uses written English to communicate technical information to a global audience. Technical writers, technical editors, science writers, and training instructors are just a few of the professions for which this book is essential reading. Even if producing technical information is not your primary job function, the Global English guidelines can help you communicate more effectively with colleagues around the world.
About the Author
John R. Kohl has worked at SAS Institute as a technical writer, technical editor, and linguistic engineer since 1992. For the past several years, John has devoted much of his time to terminology issues and to refining the Global English guidelines. As a linguistic engineer, John customizes and supports tools and processes that help make SAS documentation more consistent, easier to translate, and easier for non-native speakers of English to understand. John has been interested in machine translation and other language technologies for many years, and he is a charter member of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
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