The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation

摘要

Guides to grammar, usage and punctuation have been likened to nets cast on water - language, like water, pours through in unruly and idiosyncratic ways, refusing to be tabulated and categorized. Nevertheless, in modern times, from Fowler and Gowers and Partridge on, students of the English language have turned to guides for advice, on being correct, clear, speaking standard English (a controversial issue in itself), and for settling arguments about whether to use which or that, what is a dangling gerund and when to use the subjunctive, distinctions between the colon and the semicolon and the dash and the hyphen, using gender-free pronouns and eccentric plurals and how to pronounce words.