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Saturday, September 14, 2013

English Writing Basics


Was Grade School Really That Long Ago?


I took a computer based course at work that was meant to improve writing in business. The main topic was an in depth discussion of the eight parts of speech. For those of you who have also forgotten, the eight parts are as follows: Nouns, Pronouns, Verbs, Adverbs, Adjectives, Conjunctions, Interjections and Prepositions.

I am embarrassed to admit that I received a score of only 68% correct on the pre-course exam. (Struggled to answer any Simple, Perfect or Progressive verb tense questions correctly.) Although I took this course lightly, thinking that this was all taught back in grade school, I was shocked at how much I’d not retained. Plus there have been numerous changed in English grammar. For instance it is now proper to begin a sentence with a proposition, such as “but”. I thought that for as much as I read and write on a daily basis, an English grammar course would be a waste of time, it wasn’t. Well, hopefully my writing has not truly been God awful all this time!


In this series of posts I am going to share some of what I was retaught in this class.
1)  The 8 Parts of Speech
2)  The Use of Nouns

Monday, September 2, 2013

Best Selling Books Of All Time



1. A Tale of Two Cites  by Charles Dickens

2. The Lord of the Rings  by JRR Tolkien

3. The Little Prince  by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

4. The Hobbit  by JRR Tolkien

5. Dream of the Red Chamber  by Cao Xueqin

6. And Then There Were None  by Agatha Christie

7. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

8. She: A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard

9. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

10. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

11. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

12. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

13. Steps to Christ by Ellen G. White

14. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

15. Heidi's Years of Wandering and Learning by Johanna Spyri

16. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock

17. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

18. Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions by Anna Sewell

19. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

20. The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins

21. Watership Down by Richard Adams

22. The Hite Report by Shere Hite

23. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

24. The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy

25. The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter

26. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling

27. Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

28. A Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard

29. Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

30. Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

31. How the Steel Was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovsky

32. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

33. The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

34. You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay

35. Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer

36. In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? By Charles M. Sheldon

37. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

38. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

39. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

40. The Diary of a Young Girl, The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank

41. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

42. The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren

43. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

44. The Revolt of Mamie Stover by William Bradford Huie

45. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

46. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

47. The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey

48. The Young Guard by Alexander Alexandrovich Fadeyev

49. Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson

50. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

51. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

52. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

53. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey

54. Virgin Soil Upturned by Mikhail Sholokhov

55. The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield

56. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

57. Uncle Styopa by Sergey Mikhalkov

58. The Godfather by Mario Puzo

59. Love Story by Erich Segal

60. Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong

61. The Happy Hooker: My Own Story by Xaviera Hollander

62. Jaws by Peter Benchley

63. Love You Forever by Robert Munsch

64. The Women's Room by Marilyn French

65. What to Expect When You're Expecting by Arlene Eisenberg and Heidi Murkoff

66. The Adventures of Huckleberry by Finn Mark Twain

67. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend

68. Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft by Thor Heyerdahl

69. The Good Soldier by Jaroslav Hašek

70. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

71. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

72. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

73. The Shack by William P. Young

74. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown

75. The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

76. Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney

77. Shōgun by James Clavell

78. The Poky Little Puppy by Janette Sebring Lowrey

79. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

80. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

81. Perfume by Patrick Süskind

82. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

83. The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans

84. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

85. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

86. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

87. God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell

88. Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro

89. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

90. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

91. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

92. Life After Life by Raymond Moody

93. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

94. Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

95. Dune by Frank Herbert

96. The Plague by Albert Camus

97. No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

98. The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris

99. The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller

100. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

101. Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

102. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

103. The Prophet by Khalil Gibran

104. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

105. The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson

106. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

107. Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett

108. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

109. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss

110. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

111. Wild Swans by Jung Chang

112. Santa Evita by Tomás Eloy Martínez

113. Night by Elie Wiesel

114. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

115. Confucius from the Heart by Yu Dan

116. The Total Woman by Marabel Morgan

117. Knowledge-value Revolution by Taichi Sakaiya

118. Problems in China's Socialist Economy by Xue Muqiao

119. What Color is Your Parachute? By Richard Nelson Bolles

120. The Dukan Diet by Pierre Dukan

121. The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort

122. The Gospel According to Peanuts by Robert L. Short

123. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

124. Life of Pi by Yann Martel