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Introduction xvii • The second covers the advanced “rules of the road” when moving to American English. • The third deals with the application of those rules to writing in the workplace and school. • The fourth is devoted to suggestions on how to make a smoother tran- sition to American English from other forms of English. Rather than provide dozens of pages of text, I’ve organized most chap- ters around a short set of topics and rules that are set out at the beginning or end. I’ve also written the book so you can read it straight through or refer to a specific chapter if you need guidance in a particular area. This means that occasionally we’ll repeat core concepts since our assumption is that some readers will not have read what came before. The bottom line? Feel free to consult the chapters and sections most relevant to you. Like any writer, I stand on the broad shoulders of the many writers and scholars who’ve addressed these topics before. I’ve tried to credit as many as I could, as often as I could, and there’s also an extensive bibliography of sources, both at the end and online. If I failed to acknowledge anyone when I should have, the omission is inadvertent, and I apologize in advance. Note, too, that there are places in the book where I reference material from my previous book on writing, Writing to Win: The Legal Writer. After all, if you can’t “borrow” from yourself, who can you borrow from? Or whom, as the case may be. All this introductory material, however, is merely a prologue to the job of understanding how to communicate in 21st-century American English. As promised, we’ll begin with the question of what it means to be an American. The American language displays its writers’ preoccupations with size, speed, equality, self-reliance, informality, chaos, mobility, and novelty—not to mention a multitude of other attributes. “I hear America singing,” wrote Walt Whitman more than a century ago. Unless you, too, can begin to hear those voices, you can’t become flu- ent in American English. So let us begin.