Table of Contents

To the Instructor Introduction Why Brush Up Your English? How English Brushup Works An Introduction to Grammar: The Parts of Speech Part One: Sixteen Basic Skills 1 Subjects and Verbs 2 More about Verbs 3 Subject-Verb Agreement 4 Sentence Types 5 Fragments 6 Run-Ons and Comma Splices 7 Pronouns 8 Comma 9 Apostrophe 10 Quotation Marks 11 Other Punctuation Marks 12 Capital Letters 13 Homonyms 14 Word Choice 15 Misplaced and Dangling Modifiers 16 Parallelism Part Two: Extending the Skills 17 Paper Form 18 Spelling 19 Pronoun Types 20 Adjectives and Adverbs 21 Numbers and Abbreviations 22 Usage 23 Mixed Constructions 24 More about Subjects and Verbs 25 Even More about Verbs 26 More about Subject-Verb Agreement 27 More about Run-Ons and Comma Splices 28 More about the Comma 29 More about the Apostrophe 30 More about Quotation Marks 31 More about Punctuation Marks 32 More about Capital Letters 33 More about Homonyms 34 More about Word Choice Part Three: Applying the Skills Combined Mastery Tests Editing Tests Limited Answer Key Index Correction Symbols Inside front cover Spelling List Inside back cover

About the Author

John Langan has taught reading and writing at Atlantic Cape Community College for more than 25 years. The author of a popular series of college textbooks on both writing and reading, John enjoys the challenge of developing instructive materials that are clear and lively. Before teaching, he earned advanced degrees in writing at Rutgers University and in reading at Rowan University. He also spent a year writing fiction that “is now at the back of a drawer waiting to be discovered and acclaimed posthumously.” While in school, he supported himself by working as a truck driver, a machinist, a battery assembler, a hospital attendant, and an apple packer. In addition to his wife and Philly sports teams, his passions include reading and conveying to nonreaders the pleasure and power of books. Through Townsend Press, his educational publishing company, he has developed the nonprofit “Townsend Library”—a collection of more than 100 new and classic stories that appeal to readers of any age.