Barely a month into the New Year and I’m sticking with my resolutions: I just read Patricia O’Connor’s Woe is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English.

I recommend it to you, be you grammarphobe or grammarphile.

Ms O’Connor, as a former editor of The New York Times Book Review, has probably seen some truly wretched writing over the years. With Woe is I she firmly, kindly and wittily sets us straight.

Woe is I is easy to read. I know that it’s the grammarphiles among us who actually read, page by page, books on grammar.  But you grammarphobes need not fear: This book is organized for easy referencing. Wondering when to use a semi-colon? Turn to the chapter Comma Sutra: The Joy of Punctuation. Confused about when to use infer, when to use imply, or lay/lie or on to/onto? Verbal Abuse: Words on the Endangered List will help you out.

Ms. O’Connor is as amusing as she is clear. Channeling Mary Poppins, she uses a spoonful of sugar to make sentence construction go down. She is also (unlike several of my grade school English teachers) sympathetic to the grammarphobe’s confusion. Rather than a lecture, she begins her chapter on Therapy for Pronoun Anxiety with understanding: “When a tiny word gives you a headache, it’s probably a pronoun.”

The bulk of the book covers vocabulary and sentence construction: Using the right words in the right order. In the last chapter (Saying is Believing: How to Write What you Mean), Ms. O’Connor counsels us on putting those sentences together. Her first two pieces of advice are 1. Say what you have to say, and 2. Stop when you’ve said it.

So, having said Read Woe is I, I’ll stop now.