Mark Tredinnick. The Little Green Grammar Book. Sydney: UNSW, 2008 [Book review]

Mark Tredinnick's The Little Green Grammar Book is a consciously nonformal guide to finding the most effective way to write. Tredinnick eschews any kind of encyclopaedic approach to favour instead an outline of the grammatical laws of the English language that begins with the whole rather than the parts. Thus begins the first major section of the book, "A Natural History of the Sentence": the inner life of its word order, how it makes meaning as more than the sum of its parts, family relationships between phrases and clauses, basic structures.