This is an extremely useful compendium for those who–like me–do not consider themselves to be good with words.<p>It has many excellent writing tips, examples of bad grammar usage, comparisons between poor and good usage including styles, lists of misspelled words, differences between UK and US spelling and much, much more.<p>What makes it particularly useful as a reference is that it's organized in such a way that one can quickly look up a subject or topic whilst writing. The well organized and optimally detailed table of contents makes this possible. Just click on the relevant entry and one is linked to a well written section on said topic that can be read in isolation or as part of the complete work.<p>Highly recommended.
For eReaders, here is the book as an integral pdf<p><a href="https://2012books.lardbucket.org/pdfs/writers-handbook.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://2012books.lardbucket.org/pdfs/writers-handbook.pdf</a>
Clicking on "Licensing Information" and drilling down a few more links gets to the meat of what this is[1] (TL;DR: It's an archive of a Creative Commons licensed edition of an undergrad college text book. For those wondering who the target audience is: undergrads):<p>> What is this?<p>> First off, this is not the website for the original publisher. Instead, this is the archive of a small project by aschmitz to archive Creative Commons-licensed copies of all the books which were available online from a specific publisher at the end of 2012. (That publisher has asked to remain unnamed here. For more information, see the attribution page.)<p>> That publisher is a textbook publisher, focusing on (mostly entry-level) college textbooks. From their beginning until the end of 2012, they licensed all of their books under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 license, allowing anyone who so desired to copy them, give them away, or modify them, as long as they acknowledged the authors, released the copies under the same license, and didn't do so for commercial gain. This was an unusual model, but they hoped it would work. (They sold access to additional study materials, as well as copies of books that would fit well on e-readers.)<p>> In late 2012, they decided that the process of giving away access to their textbooks online wasn't working, and decided to switch to a different model, requiring students to pay for access to the books starting in 2013. (At least initially, these fees ware rather cheap compared to normal textbook prices, but still not free.)<p>> Because the books were still available under a Creative Commons license at the end of 2012, I downloaded them to have copies known to be available under a Creative Commons license. I then repackaged them so that they are available outside of the publisher's website, and can be used by anyone under the terms of their Creative Commons license.<p>[1]: <a href="https://2012books.lardbucket.org" rel="nofollow">https://2012books.lardbucket.org</a>