Lynch, Guide to Grammar and Style

Now Available:

The English Language:
A User's Guide
A much-revised and expanded version of this on-line guide, with hundreds of added examples.

Guide to Grammar and Style — Comments

From the Guide to Grammar and Style by Jack Lynch

I do welcome comments on my Guide to Grammar and Style, but please please please read this before sending questions my way.

The popularity of the guide is gratifying — it gets thousands of hits every day — but that very popularity makes it impossible for me to answer questions and settle office arguments. I have a full-time job, and this ain't it. So I regret that I can't give personal responses to most queries. I'll occasionally break my rule when a question intrigues me, but usually can manage nothing more than a canned response. Besides, whatever I may think in my more self-satisfied moods, I'm just not qualified to arbitrate the language for the rest of the world.

Here's where to go for things not covered here:

First, check the standard reference books! I'm amazed at how many people ask questions that could be settled by a thirty-second peek in a pocket dictionary. I recommend a few good dictionaries in my guide. There are also guides to typing practices in many secretarial handbooks.
Check out the Additional Reading section of my guide, or browse the links to other writing sites.
For less cut-and-dry questions, you'll get a wide range of responses — some of them even well-informed — from the newsgroup alt.usage.english.

If, however, anything in the guide is unclear, inaccurate, misleading, or simply missing, please drop me a line at jlynch@andromeda.rutgers.edu.