It’s hard to believe.  It’s nearly June and high school graduation is fast approaching.  It’s a time of endings and beginnings – an exciting, expectant, wistful time of the year.

Just yesterday I took my 4-year-old son on his first trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota.  Next year he will graduate from high school and begin making a life on his own.  Two years later his sister will follow him.

How do the years pass by so quickly? 

Like many parents, I am wondering what the future holds for my children.  Have they acquired the skills and knowledge they need to lead satisfying and productive lives?

Will they find their way in adulthood?  Will they prosper?  Will they be happy?

As a parent, how can I be sure they have the tools and resources they need to succeed in college and on the job?  Well, one thing I can do is send them on their way with some helpful books.

■If my children were unable to identify the four errors in this run-on sentence, “Its not fair there teacher is to strict,” and if they were not particularly motivated to improve their skills, I would give them an easy-to-use reference book they could browse a few minutes at a time and pick up when they needed to find the answer to a specific question.

A great little book in this category is Rules of Thumb, by Jay Silverman, Elaine Hughes, and Diana Roberts Wienbroer, three teachers with over 20 years’ experience in teaching the basics.  Another is Edward Corbette’s The Little English Handbook, one of the most popular quick reference guides on the market.

■If my children were so discouraged or turned off by writing that they had trouble starting assignments, I would give them Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, a fun and empowering book that offers playful techniques for overcoming writer’s block.

■If my children were fairly competent writers, if they made only occasional errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, but their writing style was awkward and stiff, I would give them William Strunk and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style, a classic lesson book written in an elegant and playful style.

■If my children were competent college-bound writers who needed a useful guide to academic writing, I would give them Diana Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference or Lynn Quitman Troyka’s Handbook for Writers.

■If my children were heading off to their first full-time jobs, whether competent or incompetent writers, I would give them Charles Brusaw’s The Business Writer’s Handbook or William Sabin’s The Gregg Reference Manual, or both.

■If my children were unusually talented and competent writers who were willing to work at becoming accomplished stylists, I would give them Joseph Williams’ Style:  Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace.  If my children were considering writing as a career, I would give them William Zinsser’s delightfully written and entertaining On Writing Well.

■If I didn’t know my children’s level of skill or interests, I would give them an unbeatable package of three:  Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference, and Brusaw’s The Business Writer’s Handbook.

These books can be found at most libraries and bookstores.  If a bookstore does not have the book you want, it will order it for you and notify you when it arrives.

What if you don’t have children who will graduate in June but you know someone who does?  Consider making one or more of these books a gift.

It’s a nice way of saying, “I care about your future.”

Writing for Business and Pleasure
Copyright by Stephen Wilbers
www.wilbers.com

With the end of the school year fast approaching, you may be thinking about gifts for high school graduates.  Here’s a great idea:  the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

Now if you decide to act on this advice, don’t expect the kind of exuberant, over-the-top expression of gratitude you might receive for, say, handing over the keys to a new BMW.  I know from experience.

Last year my wife and I gave a dozen of these novel gifts – dictionaries, that is – for which we received polite thank-you notes.  Admittedly, dictionaries may not to every graduate’s liking, but I wonder how many of them are now being consulted by college freshmen who otherwise might lack ready access to good, up-to-date reference books.

If you like my idea of giving books as graduation presents but want to give something more daring than a dictionary, here are some additional suggestions:

Standard reference books.

■Edward Corbette and Sheryl Finkle’s The Little English Handbook, Choices and Conventions:  With its clear explanations and helpful examples, this succinct, easy-to-use reference book has stood the test of time.

■Diana Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference:  This popular guide covers basics such as word choice and grammatical sentences, as well as an area every college student will need to know:  the conventions of research writing, with special attention to the most common documentation styles.  Rules for Writers, another version of this book, comes with exercises.

Basic grammar books.

■Anne Stilman’s Grammatically Correct, The Writer’s Essential Guide to Punctuation, Spelling, Style, Usage, and Grammar:  For students who never have understood the difference between a conjunction and a preposition or learned the basic conventions governing punctuation, this book offers unusually clear definitions and explanations.  Its format and deliberate style lend themselves more to cover-to-cover reading than to quick reference.

■William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style:  In appearance the most boring of books, this brief classic continues to surprise and delight writers with its pithy advice on how to write clear, elegant prose.  I know of no other book that combines basic rules of grammar and subtle techniques of style with such insight and power.

Offbeat appeals to humor.

■Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Eager, the Innocent, and the Doomed:  Here’s the book for the student who never could muster enough interest in language to learn the rules of grammar.  Playfully bizarre, luxuriously sensual, and delightfully illustrated, this book ranges from bats to corsets in search of interesting examples.

■Patricia O’Conner’s Woe Is I, The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English:  Though not as outlandish as Gordon’s, this brief, entertaining book also appeals through wit and humor.  Billed as “a survival guide for intelligent people who probably never have diagrammed a sentence and never will,” it provides a lively review of common errors in pronoun case and agreement, collective nouns, possessives, subject-verb agreement, usage, and punctuation.

In addition to these suggestions, for more advanced writers I recommend Joseph Williams’ Style:  Ten Lessons in Clarity & Grace and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well:  An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction.  For graduates entering the job market I recommend Charles Brusaw, Gerald J. Alred, and Walter E. Oliu’s The Business Writer’s Handbook, Mary Munter’s Guide to Managerial Communication, and William Sabin’s The Gregg Reference Manual.  For descriptions of these books and additional recommendations, see my Web page.