A short comment on the topic of people not wanting to buy an expensive refernce work or guide on "how to write..." when they are not only mostly poor students but also just doing thw whole writing thing for fun.
There a lot of free resources on the net that can be valuable alternative.
Some books that are avaidable online like at
www.bartleby.com/reference/
where you can get "The American Heritage Book of English Usage" and "The Columbia Guide to Standard American English" as well as many other classic and contemporary refernce works.
Other sources like this website:
Common Errors in English
were so sucesful that they have been made into bucks.
There are some that can occasionally be helpful like
www.worldwidewords.org
And often if nothing else you can search through places like alt.usage.english to find if somebody had the same problem as you before.
If nothing else helps you can always simply do a google search on any phrase or term you are in doubt about. It will not show how right or wrong you are, but it will give you examples of others who have done the same, the context they have done it in and how many of them there are. You might still get things completly wrong like that but at least you will have lots of company.
So having no money to buy tons of books is no excuse.
There a lot of free resources on the net that can be valuable alternative.
Some books that are avaidable online like at
www.bartleby.com/reference/
where you can get "The American Heritage Book of English Usage" and "The Columbia Guide to Standard American English" as well as many other classic and contemporary refernce works.
Other sources like this website:
Common Errors in English
were so sucesful that they have been made into bucks.
There are some that can occasionally be helpful like
www.worldwidewords.org
And often if nothing else you can search through places like alt.usage.english to find if somebody had the same problem as you before.
If nothing else helps you can always simply do a google search on any phrase or term you are in doubt about. It will not show how right or wrong you are, but it will give you examples of others who have done the same, the context they have done it in and how many of them there are. You might still get things completly wrong like that but at least you will have lots of company.
So having no money to buy tons of books is no excuse.