Painless Grammar (Barron's Painless)

Most students and many teachers think of grammar books as being, at best, necessary evils--but here's a book that breaks free from the pattern and takes the boredom out of grammar. Written primarily for children on the middle-school level, this book mixes parts of speech and proper punctuation with healthy portions of humor, down-to-earth examples, and fun illustrations that will appeal to adolescents. While kids are learning painlessly about how to make verbs agree with their subjects and pronouns with their antecedents, they look at some of the wackier words in the English language and see how they are often misused. A final chapter gives basic instructions for editing, which the author calls a fancy word for cleaning up messy writing.