– Customer review on 30/01/2012

Every high school graduate who invited me to his/her grad party is getting this book this year. Grammar Girl's friendly voice makes her readers enjoy learning from her and want to keep reading. With just enough etymology to help the reader understand and remember why a word means what it does (She explains, for example, that "fungible" is related to "function" in its Latin root. Otherwise, we might not remember what "fungible" means because we might get confused and think it's related to "fungus"), the book is fun to read and not dry, as some people might expect from a book about 50-cent words. (And, actually, they aren't really 50 centers, just words that are expected in college-level discourse, like "sans," "hegemony," and "fallacy").

Grammar Girl uses each word in a sentence, of course, to help the reader wrap her head around the word. But the examples are not silly, inorganic ones made up for the book; rather, they are real-world usage examples and come largely from popular culture, which is perhaps the best thing about what Grammar Girl has done in this book. I mean, if Brian on Family Guy uses a word you don't know, it's pretty clear that improving your vocabulary won't just make you smarter, but will help you enjoy the simple things in life, like watching television.