When Words Collide: A Media Writer's Guide to Grammar and Style

WHEN WORDS COLLIDE is the most versatile grammar and usage handbook for beginning and continuing media writers. As a main text, the book is praised by students and professors for its straightforward, clear treatment of grammar, offered in a lighthearted, almost conversational tone. As a handbook, the text serves as a reference tool for students throughout their writing careers. It provides concise and clear explanations and examples, or a quick and accurate answer to a grammar or usage question. The unique 'from writer to writer' perspective engages students and guides them firsthand through the writing process.

Lauren Kessler is the author of ten books, including Los Angeles Times best-seller and Oregon Book Award finalist The Happy Bottom Riding Club (Random House 2000), the biography of one of the most colorful women of the 20th century: pioneering aviatrix, Hollywood stunt pilot and bordello madame Pancho Barnes. Her other books include a season-in-the-life narrative about women's sports, Full Court Press (Dutton 1997); Stubborn Twig (Random House1994), which won the Frances Fuller Victor Award for literary nonfiction; and After All These Years (Thunder's Mouth Press 1990), portraits of 60s radicals critics praised as "vital and revealing." Her books have been translated into Italian, Japanese and Chinese. Kessler's essays have appeared in Salon, The Nation and Oregon Quarterly. She writes regularly about the craft of writing for Writer's Digest and has published articles in a variety of magazines. The founder and editor of Etude, an online magazine devoted to new and emerging voices in literary nonfiction, she directs the graduate program in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon in Eugene. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and is a graduate of the Medill school of Journalism, Northwestern University.