front cover of Grammar Choices for Graduate and Professional Writers, Second Edition
Grammar Choices for Graduate and Professional Writers, Second Edition
Nigel A. Caplan
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Grammar Choices is a different kind of grammar book: It is written for graduate students, including MBA, master’s, and doctoral candidates, as well as postdoctoral researchers and faculty. Additionally, it describes the language of advanced academic writing with more than 300 real examples from successful graduate students and from published texts, including corpora.
 
Each of the eight units in Grammar Choices contains: an overview of the grammar topic; a preview test that allows students to assess their control of the target grammar and teachers to diagnose areas of difficulty;  an authentic example of graduate-student writing showing the unit grammar in use;  clear descriptions of essential grammar structures using the framework of functional grammar, cutting-edge research in applied linguistics, and corpus studies; vocabulary relevant to the grammar point is introduced—for example, common verbs in the passive voice, summary nouns used with this/these, and irregular plural nouns; authentic examples for every grammar point from corpora and published texts; exercises for every grammar point that help writers develop grammatical awareness and use, including completing sentences, writing, revising, paraphrasing, and editing; and a section inviting writers to investigate discipline-specific language use and apply it to an academic genre.
 
Among the changes in the Second Edition are:
  • new sections on parallel form (Unit 2) and possessives (Unit 5)
  • revised and expanded explanations, but particularly regarding verb complementation, complement noun clauses, passive voice, and stance/engagement
  • a restructured Unit 2 and significantly revised/updated Unit 7
  • new Grammar Awareness tasks in Units 3, 5, and 6
  • new exercises plus revision/updating of many others
  • self-editing checklists in the Grammar in Your Discipline sections at the end of each unit
  • representation of additional academic disciplines (e.g., engineering, management) in example sentences and texts and in exercises.

 
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Hired Pens
Professional Writers in America’s Golden Age of Print
Ronald Weber
Ohio University Press, 1997

Just as mass-market magazines and cheap books have played important roles in the creation of an American identity, those skilled craftsmen (and women) whose careers are the subjects of Ronald Weber’s narrative profoundly influenced the outlook and strategies of the high-culture writers who are generally the focus of literary studies.

Hired Pens, a history of the writing profession in the United States, recognizes the place of independent writers who wrote for their livelihood from the 1830s and 1840s, with the first appearance of a broad-based print culture, to the 1960s.

Many realist authors began on this American Grub Street. Jack London turned out hackwork for any paying market he could find, while Scott Fitzgerald’s stories in slick magazines in the 1920s and early ’30s established his name as a writer.

From Edgar Allen Poe’s earliest forays into writing for pay to Sylvia Plath’s attempts to produce fiction for mass-circulation journals, Hired Pens documents without agenda the evolution of professional writing in all its permutations—travel accounts, sport, popular biography and history, genre and series fiction—and the culture it fed.

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