As the author of the Word Court columns that appear in The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Wallraff is one of America's most widely read and beloved writers on language. Now, in Your Own Words, Wallraff guides the reader through a variety of intriguing questions about English-and simultaneously explains how you, too, can be a language expert. On one level, Your Own Words is about dictionaries, stylebooks, usage manuals, visual dictionaries, thesauri, writing guides, and the Internet: the strengths and weaknesses of these and other language- reference sources, where the sources disagree, and the...

By the author of the Atlantic Monthly's highly popular column "Word Court," the most engaging grammar guide of our time, with all the authority of Strunk and White and all the fun of Woe Is I.
The "Judge Judy of Grammar" was born when the Atlantic Monthly's Barbara Wallraff began answering grammar questions on America Online. This vibrant exchange became the magazine's bimonthly "Word Court," and eventually the bestselling hardcover book, Word Court.
In Word Court, Wallraff moves beyond her column to tackle common and uncommon items, establishing rules for such...