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Subject:Re: List of Good Books From:Marci Andrews <Marci_Andrews -at- NOVELL -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 19 Jan 1996 09:07:42 -0700
Frederick Falk included my name on his list...
My most-consulted books are
1 The Chicago Manual of Style
2 Merriam Webster's Dictionary
3 Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage
in addition to various house style guides and style sheets for our products.
I too would recommend anything by Horton, and anything by Brockmann.
When I have a sticky grammatical or syntactical problem that Chicago doesn't
help me enough to solve, I consult my college grammar handbooks. I don't use
just one, for the reasons Marilynne Smith cited; I look in all of them and then
figure out a workable solution. My old Harper & Row's Understanding Grammar
by Paul Roberts (1954) helps me a lot. The others include 6 editions of Harbrace
(don't ask me why I collected these), Lucile Vaughan Payne's The Lively Art of
Writing, Strunk & White, 2 different Norton handbooks, and Trimble's Writing
With Style. Sometimes I check my History of the Language and other Old
English grammar books, but that's because I did OE as part of a PhD program
and it's still interesting to me.
If my basement suddenly got flooded, I'd try to save my OED...
Hope this list is useful.
Marci Andrews, editor
Novell, Inc.
mandrews -at- novell -dot- com
