Who's Whose: A No-Nonsense Guide to Easily Confused Words

by Philip Gooden

You'll never again confuse affect and effect! Have you ever been fazed by the spelling of phased, or fretted over the difference between anxiety and angst, stationery and stationary? If so, you are not the English language is a minefield, full of words that look and sound alike but mean different things in different places. Who's Whose? is an entertaining and essential A to Z guide to the most commonly confused words in English today, with real examples of good and bad usage to make differences crystal clear. In addition to documenting these verbal confusions, it offers a sympathetic guide to the seriousness of each gaffe (the Embarassment rating), an explanation of why it happens, and some handy hints on how to avoid it in future. With Who's Whose in your corner, you'll never again mistake a principle for a principal.

Genres: Language, Reference, Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Philip Gooden lives in Bath. In addition to his Nick Revill series, Sleep of Death, he is the author of The Guinness Guide to Better English and the editor of The Mammoth Book of Literary Anecdotes. Each of his Nick Revill mysteries revolves around a Shakespearean play mirroring life - in Sleep of Death the play was Hamlet, in this offering it is Troilus and Cressida.
AKA Philippa Morgan.

Series:
* Shakespearean Murder
* Tom Ansell

Reviews

[druger2006]

Read this book is a good way to differentiate omonyms and words which have overlap in meaning.

[SHUCHI]

As I am currently reading and gaining my knowledge on the words that we commonly use in everyday English language writing, the book status is "to be rated". Still, I wanted to mention to those of you who are seeking to improve their writing communications skill that this is the book to check out. I was surprised that people get confused about words like advice/ advise and device/devise. It is not easy to perfect a language especially if you are not its native speaker. Give this book a through read and you might want to keep it as a "English word check dictionary".

[Caroline]

4 * in its category.