Yes, I am a serial em-dash abuser and a junkie for inappropriate British spelling. That and which are my bête noire, I can't keep straight when you have to spell out numbers, and I have given up entirely on lay and lie. I am only now figuring out proper parenthetical punctuation, I place commas to make a sentence read like it hear it in my head, and Kurt Vonnegut will get my semicolons when he pries them from my cold dead prose. All this is mostly a nonissue in my professional nerd writing. Journal publishers and tech pubs departments both provide a grammar safety net, albeit one leading to tense email exchanges explaining, yes, the punctuation should go outside the quotation marks because typing the grammatically-correct version of the command would erase the hard drive, and, yes, "albeit" is a perfectly good word. Alas, Blogger doesn't offer the luxury of $100 page charges and a bevy of English majors who humiliate you at the company volleyball outings, so here we are.
One never knows when a random Random House talent scout might drop by looking to turn a snarky post on variational calculus and a six-figure advance into the next best seller, so it behooves us all to polish the filthy missives spilling from our fingertips as best we can. Midnight shots with Hemingway no longer in the offing and the tragic shadow of Congressional hearings darkening the stoop of your favorite on-line university, it falls to the purview of Amazon to get your grammar fix and fixed. Gordon and Young are wonderful resources, yet they form extreme ends of a continuum: Transitive Vampire is a brief and loopy bird's-eye view of the grammar landscape while TWH comprises a more somber encyclopedic approach. One is the crazy stripper girlfriend you always dreamed about; the other a stolid Lutheran woman you met at the potluck who will bear your many children.
Halfway between those poles we find Lyn Dupré and her BUGS in Writing. (I'm not thrilled with the title either, but the book appears to have been aimed at the bustling 1990s Bay Area software community. Ergo wordplay.) The book is organized into 150 bite-sized chapters, each detailing a specific common writing mistake and its proper solution. So we find chapters on word choice and word match, clichés and jargon, dashes and prepositions, figures and tables and bibliographies and appendices. The Bad, the Ugly, the Good, and the Splendid.
The bad-before/good-after sentence examples required in such works here often draw from technical writing, similar to (but never quite as hardcore as) Young. It's not necessary to write about Fourier transforms to demonstrate grammar, but seeing familiar faces helps keep the relevance crisp. The chapters are self-contained, allowing you to read BUGS cover-to-cover or flip open to a random topic as is your wont. Dupré maintains an authoritative yet friendly tone; her style is uncluttered but breezy enough to be read on the treadmill, which I often do (LabKitty's prose ain't the only thing getting buff). There's a nice cheat sheet in the appendix that you can stick on the wall of your office for quick reference, assuming Starbucks will let you do that sort of thing.
On a final note, BUGS is peppered with photographs of Dupré's personal life, which I found a little unnerving. You won't see snapshots of the family on holiday in Young and Gordon illustrates her book with old timey woodcarvings. I get the feeling if you had asked Strunk and White for a hunky boudoir photo to include in Elements of Style they would have silently stared at you over the tops of their bifocals until you combusted. On the other hand, Dupré includes many pictures of cats, so I'll allow it. YMMV.
View BUGS in Writing on Amazon
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