"This wise and entertaining guide by one of the great editors of our time offers timeless tools for making meaning clear. Refresh your writing. Unravel convoluted sales talk written to deceive. See through political campaigns erected on a tower of falsehoods. Fake news is but one of the pimples of a literate civilization under siege. Slovenly English! Billions of words come at us every day with unimaginable velocity and shriveled meaning, in social...

With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson -- the acclaimed author of The Lost Continent -- brilliantly explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can't), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed...

"The author of the acclaimed Proust and the Squid follows up with a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies. A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Since...

Presents a humorous approach to grammar, covering parts of speech, sentences, agreement, word usage, and editing, with examples and cartoon illustrations.

"Write for Your Life is a guide for those who don't, won't, or think they can't write, what Anna Quindlen calls "civilians." Using examples past, present and future--from Anne Frank to Toni Morrison to members of her own family--Quindlen makes vivid all the ways in which writing connects us, to ourselves and to those we cherish. From love letters written after World War II to journal reflections from nurses and doctors today, and using her personal...

The Poetical Works of John Milton. Edited by Henry Charles Beeching libreka classics — These are classics of literary history, reissued and made available to a wide audience. Immerse yourself in well-known and popular titles!

"Everyone likes to think they know a bit about language: There are some words that you simply can't translate into English. The origin of a word tells you how it should be used. A dialect is inferior to a language. The problem is, none of these statements are true. In Don't Believe a Word, linguist David Shariatmadari explodes nine common myths about language and introduces us to some of the fundamental insights of modern linguistics. By the end of...

Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers' style of dress and speech...

Since mankind exists, we have felt the need to communicate, to express our feelings, to cultivate our imagination and we have done it through a gift that differentiates us from the rest of living beings. Writing is a vocation, born from a need of each person. It is an inner manifestation, a communicational expression, be it artistic, scientific or of another literary genre. It is a property of the human being, communication through writing. This means...

This is a guide for mastering the current basic signs used to communicate with deaf people in either the word order of the English language or in the American Sign Language pattern. It provides the basic vocabulary needed for persons entering interpreter training programs. Over 1500 signs have been illustrated and are grouped by chapter into their natural categories. Includes line drawings and step-by-step descriptions of positions and movements,...