The Elements of Style, by Strunk & White, may be the book most frequently assigned to high school and college classes. Features quotes such as: “vigorous writing is concise” and “avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language.” Beloved by editors, teachers, and anyone else who does a lot of proofreading. Will improve anyone’s writing. For a hard copy of the book, go here.
The Most Common Mistakes in English Usage is a book which is old-school but thorough. It focuses not on the basics of grammar – verbs, clauses, participles – but on the common errors that arise from confusion. This may be confusion between two words – lay and lie, infer and imply – or it may be a confusion of logical sentence order. A resource for those of us who are worried we don’t communicate as precisely as we intend to.
Woe is I is an approachable guide for those of us who have forgotten our grammar. It walks a nice line between reviewing the fundamentals and exploring the more esoteric aspects of our language. In particular, it covers those rules which we’ve heard but never really understood, and the archaic constructions which have died a natural death.
The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager and the Doomed In this goth’s guide to grammar, the nouns are as likely to be vampires as debutantes, and despite the title, the book is a surprisingly cheerful read. Like Woe is I and other humorous grammar books, what it lacks in breadth it makes up for in fun.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves, subtitled “the zero tolerance approach to punctuation” will come as a relief to anyone who has ever given an angry rant about a mis-apostrophed sign in a public place. A wonderfully comic call to arms.