This deluxe edition contains the complete contents of The Little Red Writing Book and The Little Gold Grammar Book. Whereas writing is based on principles -- in which writing is deemed better or worse, more effective or less effective -- grammar is based on rules, in which writing is deemed right or wrong, correct or incorrect. With coverage of the most useful writing principles and the most commonly encountered rules of grammar, The Little Red Writing Book Deluxe Edition is an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to master those skills that will make a good writer even better.

Enjoy the benefits of your own self-paced writing course: Writing has four pillars -- structure, style, readability, and grammar -- and each pillar is like the single leg of a sturdy chair.

*Structure relates to organization and deciding in which order to present your ideas. Learn how to choose the best writing structure to develop your ideas, how to break your writing topic into two to four parts, and how to write with a top-down approach.

*Style describes how one writes, including how to use specific examples to support what is written. Learn how to make writing more simple, powerful, and vivid. Understand how to vary sentence beginnings, how to create a formal and informal tone, and how to keep writing gender neutral.
*Readability focuses on presentation and how to make your document visually pleasing and easy to read. Learn how to make key words stand out, how to use headings and headlines to frame writing, and how to increase the use of white space to allow your document to breathe.
*Grammar is about expressing language in a correct and acceptable form. Review the rules of grammar in terms of six common categories (subject-verb agreement, pronoun usage, modification, parallelism, comparisons, and verb tenses), and use short exercises and problems to help integrate key concepts of grammar, diction, idioms, and style.
*Also included are special sections on editing tips and punctuation, America English vs. British English, and traditional writing vs. digital writing.

Author's bio: Brandon Royal is an award-winning writer whose educational authorship includes The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Gold Grammar Book, The Little Green Math Book, and The Little Blue Reasoning Book. During his tenure working in Hong Kong for US-based Kaplan Educational Centers - a Washington Post subsidiary and the largest test-preparation organization in the world - Brandon honed his theories of teaching and education and developed a set of key learning principles to help define the basics of writing, grammar, math, and reasoning. A Canadian by birth and graduate of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, his interest in writing began after completing writing courses at Harvard University. Since then he has authored a dozen books and reviews of his books have appeared in Time Asia magazine, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal of America, Midwest Book Review, The Asian Review of Books, Choice Reviews Online, Asia Times Online, and About.com. Brandon is a five-time winner of the International Book Awards, a seven-time gold medalist at the President's Book Awards, as well as recipient of the Educational Book of the Year award as presented by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. He has also been a winner or finalist at the Ben Franklin Book Awards, the Global eBook Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Awards, the IPPY Awards, the USA Book News Best Book Awards, and the Foreword magazine Book of the Year Awards. He continues to write and publish in the belief that there will always be a place for books that inspire, enlighten, and enrich.

This guidebook addresses one of the most critical yet seldom taught skills. Reasoning skills help us make sense of the world, including how to better make decisions, tackle opportunities, evaluate claims, and solve problems. Interwoven within the book's five sections -- Perception & Mindset, Decision Making, Creative Thinking, Analyzing Arguments, and Mastering Logic -- reader's will discover 50 reasoning tips that summarize the common themes behind classic reasoning problems and situations. Appendixes contain summaries of fallacious reasoning, analogies, trade-offs, and a review of critical reading skills. A wealth of examples, charts, and insightful problems makes The Little Blue Reasoning Book an invaluable guide for any individual wanting to further sharpen his or her thinking skills.

Enjoy the benefits of your own self-paced reasoning course:
*Gain insights into the four classic mindsets and how each influences one's outlook.
*Make better decisions by framing problems with quantitative tools.
*Employ creative thinking to bypass roadblocks and unlock novel solutions.
*Evaluate claims by challenging the strength of key assumptions.
*Use logic to break down arguments in a clear, easy-to-understand manner.
*Review the 10 classic trade-offs to speed recognition of core issues.
*Read with added clarity, whether your goal involves pleasure or profit.

Author's bio: Brandon Royal is an award-winning writer whose educational authorship includes The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Gold Grammar Book, and The Little Green Math Book. During his tenure working in Hong Kong for US-based Kaplan Educational Centers - a Washington Post subsidiary and the largest test-preparation organization in the world - Brandon honed his theories of teaching and education and developed a set of key learning principles to help define the basics of writing, grammar, math, and reasoning. A Canadian by birth and graduate of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, his interest in writing began after completing writing courses at Harvard University. Since then he has authored a dozen books and reviews of his books have appeared in Time Asia magazine, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal of America, Midwest Book Review, The Asian Review of Books, Choice Reviews Online, Asia Times Online, and About.com. Brandon is a five-time winner of the International Book Awards, a seven-time gold medalist at the President's Book Awards, as well as recipient of the Educational Book of the Year award as presented by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. He has also been a winner or finalist at the Ben Franklin Book Awards, the Global eBook Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Awards, the IPPY Awards, the USA Book News Best Book Awards, and the Foreword magazine Book of the Year Awards. He continues to write and publish in the belief that there will always be a place for books that inspire, enlighten, and enrich.

There's no need to fear the grammar goblin. Whether you're a high school or college student, test-prep candidate, or working professional, this guidebook offers a review of grammar that is both relevant and distilled. A wealth of examples, charts, and engaging exercises makes The Little Gold Grammar Book an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to master those skills that will make a good writer even better.

Enjoy the benefits of your own self-paced grammar course:

*Grammar: A 100-question quiz focuses on the most useful areas of the big six grammar categories -- subject-verb agreement, pronoun usage, modification, parallelism, comparisons, and verb tenses.
*Diction: A collection of 50-plus word pairings highlight differences among easily confused word choices. Should we write anyone or any one ... who or whom ... may be or maybe ... toward or towards ... different from or different than?
*Idioms: A compilation of 200 idioms provides a convenient review of tricky grammatical phrases. Do we write prefer x to y or prefer x over y ... in comparison to or in comparison with ... regarded as or regarded to be?
*Review: A selection of 30 multiple-choice problems, complete with explanations and author's notes, integrate key concepts of grammar, diction, idioms, and style.
*Also included are special sections on editing tips and punctuation, American English vs. British English, and traditional writing vs. digital writing.

Author's bio: Brandon Royal is an award-winning writer whose educational authorship includes The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Red Writing Book Deluxe Edition, The Little Green Math Book, and The Little Blue Reasoning Book. During his tenure working in Hong Kong for US-based Kaplan Educational Centers - a Washington Post subsidiary and the largest test-preparation organization in the world - Brandon honed his theories of teaching and education and developed a set of key learning principles to help define the basics of writing, grammar, math, and reasoning. A Canadian by birth and graduate of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, his interest in writing began after completing writing courses at Harvard University. Since then he has authored a dozen books and reviews of his books have appeared in Time Asia magazine, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal of America, Midwest Book Review, The Asian Review of Books, Choice Reviews Online, Asia Times Online, and About.com. Brandon is a five-time winner of the International Book Awards, a seven-time gold medalist at the President's Book Awards, as well as recipient of the Educational Book of the Year award as presented by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. He has also been a winner or finalist at the Ben Franklin Book Awards, the Global eBook Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Awards, the IPPY Awards, the USA Book News Best Book Awards, and the Foreword magazine Book of the Year Awards. He continues to write and publish in the belief that there will always be a place for books that inspire, enlighten, and enrich.

Fine-tune your numerical mindset with a quantitative review that serves as a tool for perceiving probability in a new way. Whether you're a high school student, college student, or a test-prep candidate, this book's wealth of explanations and insights makes it a perfect learning companion.

Enjoy the benefits of your own short course in basic probability:
*Be able to think conceptually by understanding how key problems fit within the main topics of probability, permutations, combinations, and enumerations.
*Master basic probability using a simple flowchart to identify the correct formulas.
*Understand when to add probabilities and when to multiply probabilities.
*Be able to distinguish between events that are independent versus not independent and events that are mutually exclusive versus not mutually exclusive.
*Grasp key differences between permutations and combinations and look for key words such as arrangements or selections to indicate the correct problem type.
*Solve tricky permutation problems that involve repeated letters or numbers.
*Approach probability problems with a newfound confidence and competency.

This book is focused on those thinking skills that are essential for mastering basic probability. Such thinking skills make it much more likely that a person will be able to understand the how and why of problem solving, approach the subject in a conceptual way, and grasp those key principles that act as themes to bind related problems. These skills combine the science of math with the art of numbers.

Author's bio: Brandon Royal (CPA, MBA) is an award-winning writer whose educational authorship includes The Little Green Math Book, The Little Blue Reasoning Book, The Little Red Writing Book, and The Little Gold Grammar Book. He continues to write and publish in the belief that there will always be a place for books that inspire, enlighten, and enrich.

This book is based on a simple but powerful observation: Students and young professionals who develop outstanding writing skills do so primarily by mastering a limited number of the most important writing principles, which they use over and over again. What are these recurring principles? The answer to this question is the basis of this material. A wealth of examples, charts, and engaging exercises makes The Little Red Writing Book an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to master those skills that will make a good writer even better.

Author's bio: Brandon Royal is an award-winning writer whose educational authorship includes The Little Gold Grammar Book, The Little Green Math Book, and The Little Blue Reasoning Book. During his tenure working in Hong Kong for US-based Kaplan Educational Centers - a Washington Post subsidiary and the largest test-preparation organization in the world - Brandon honed his theories of teaching and education and developed a set of key learning principles to help define the basics of writing, grammar, math, and reasoning. A Canadian by birth and graduate of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, his interest in writing began after completing writing courses at Harvard University. Since then he has authored a dozen books and reviews of his books have appeared in Time Asia magazine, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal of America, Midwest Book Review, The Asian Review of Books, Choice Reviews Online, Asia Times Online, and About.com. Brandon is a five-time winner of the International Book Awards, a seven-time gold medalist at the President's Book Awards, as well as recipient of the Educational Book of the Year award as presented by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. He has also been a winner or finalist at the Ben Franklin Book Awards, the Global eBook Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Awards, the IPPY Awards, the USA Book News Best Book Awards, and the Foreword magazine Book of the Year Awards. He continues to write and publish in the belief that there will always be a place for books that inspire, enlighten, and enrich.

The Little Green Math Book reads like a collection of math recipes to help us blend problems, principles, and approaches in creating our own lineup of splendid math cuisine. The book's four chapters include: (1) Basic Numeracy Ingredients, (2) Wonderful Math Recipes, (3) Favorite Numeracy Dishes, and (4) Special Math Garnishments. Along with 30 of the most fundamental, recurring math principles and rules, readers will find a three-tier system to rate the difficulty level of all problems -- one chili (mild), two chilies (hot), and three chilies (very hot).

Enjoy the benefits of your own self-paced math course:
*Contains 120 all-star problems to help readers discover the secrets of basic math.
*Develop a feel for how numbers behave and what makes math problems tick.
*Learn to solve equations by translating math into words and thinking conceptually.
*Watch for pitfalls when working with percentage increase and decrease.
*Use simple math to solve business scenarios involving price, cost, volume, profit, and break-even, as well as how to calculate markup versus margin and efficiency.
*Be able to glance at graphs and grasp their underlying meaning.
*Understand correlation: weak or strong, positive or negative, linear or nonlinear.
*Gain a newfound confidence with an increased competency with numbers.

Author's bio: Brandon Royal is an award-winning writer whose educational authorship includes The Little Blue Reasoning Book, The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Gold Grammar Book, and The Little Purple Probability Book. During his tenure working in Hong Kong for US-based Kaplan Educational Centers - a Washington Post subsidiary and the largest test-preparation organization in the world - Brandon honed his theories of teaching and education and developed a set of key learning principles to help define the basics of writing, grammar, math, and reasoning. A Canadian by birth and graduate of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, his interest in writing began after completing writing courses at Harvard University. Since then he has authored a dozen books and reviews of his books have appeared in Time Asia magazine, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal of America, Midwest Book Review, The Asian Review of Books, Choice Reviews Online, Asia Times Online, and About.com. Brandon is a five-time winner of the International Book Awards, a seven-time gold medalist at the President's Book Awards, as well as recipient of the Educational Book of the Year award as presented by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. He has also been a winner or finalist at the Ben Franklin Book Awards, the Global eBook Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Awards, the IPPY Awards, the USA Book News Best Book Awards, and the Foreword magazine Book of the Year Awards. He continues to write and publish in the belief that there will always be a place for books that inspire, enlighten, and enrich.

Are we masters of or servants to our own human nature? This illustrated, short novel presents a satire on human nature. Human nature are two words that are used often, but what exactly do they mean? This work explores, in narrative form, that mysterious collage of traits, emotions, and idiosyncrasies that describes the way we are and the way we behave -- our envy, vanity, greed, and white lies as well as our loyalty, generosity, love, and honor.

Paradise Island is a fable about a young adventurer who travels to the sunny, fun-filled island of his dreams, but struggles to keep paradise found from becoming paradise lost. A product of inspirational and literary fiction, this work will appeal to readers interested in fantasy, satire, and philosophy in fiction.

Author's bio: Brandon Royal is an award-winning writer whose educational authorship includes The Little Blue Reasoning Book, The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Gold Grammar Book, and The Little Green Math Book. He continues to write and publish in the belief that there will always be a place for books that inspire, enlighten, and enrich.

GETTING INTO BUSINESS SCHOOL is based on a simple but powerful observation: Applicants who apply successfully to business school master a finite number of the most important application skills and strategies. What are these skills and strategies? The answer to this question is the basis of this book. Readers will find 100 easy-to-follow tips and a complete range of sample documents, including 50-plus sample application essays covering all ten major MBA essays types, as well as exhibits highlighting relevant application documents: sample letters of recommendation with critiques; an interview evaluation form complete with interviewer's comments; an interview thank-you note; sample employment records and professionally formatted r sum s; and extracurricular presentations showing how candidates present their awards and recognition, community service, collegiate activities, and hobbies and interests.

Read this book and gain an insider's understanding of all MBA application strategies in order to:
*Anticipate the likely reasons for acceptance and rejection at the most competitive business schools
*Understand the interplay of both quantitative and qualitative admissions components
*Write compelling admissions essays
*Present a powerful employment record
*Obtain detailed letters of recommendation
*Maximize your ability to answer interview questions with insightfulness and confidence
*Personalize your record of extracurricular involvement

Author's bio: Brandon Royal (CPA, MBA) is an award-winning educational author and a graduate of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. This book represents, in part, his distilled experience gained from having developed and taught MBA admissions courses for Kaplan Educational Centers in Hong Kong and from having conducted hundreds of hours of individual tutoring sessions that helped scores of applicants build superior applications and achieve acceptance at the world's leading business schools.

Dancing for Your Life chronicles the true story of a beautiful, young Filipina who, in order to help her family financially, leaves her home in the quiet Philippines countryside to work as a dancer in Hong Kong's red-light district of Wan Chai. This book will hold special appeal for readers interested in gaining a behind-the-scenes look at the workings of an Asian go-go bar and will serve as a companion guide for individuals interested in cultural studies, gender studies, or spirituality. It presents a rare first-person account that is thought provoking and controversial. Here is the untold story of faith, friendship, and sacrifice, but also of triumph and forgiveness.

Authors' bios: Brandon Royal is an award-winning writer whose educational authorship includes The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Gold Grammar Book, The Little Green Math Book, and The Little Blue Reasoning Book, as well as the fictional works The Map Maker and Paradise Island. A Canadian by birth and graduate of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, his interest in writing began after completing fiction and scriptwriting courses at Harvard University. Since then he has authored a dozen books and reviews of his books have appeared in Time Asia magazine, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal of America, Midwest Book Review, The Asian Review of Books, Choice Reviews Online, Asia Times Online, and About.com. Brandon is a five-time winner of the International Book Awards, a seven-time gold medalist at the President's Book Awards, as well as recipient of the Educational Book of the Year award as presented by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. He has also been a winner or finalist at the Ben Franklin Book Awards, the Global eBook Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Awards, the IPPY Awards, the USA Book News Best Book Awards, and the Foreword magazine Book of the Year Awards. He continues to write and publish in the belief that there will always be a place for books that inspire, enlighten, and enrich.

Paul Strahan is the author of several children's books including The Farm Girl and the Butterflies (Bronze Medal Winner - Moonbeam Book Awards), The Woodcutter Prince, and The Never-Ending Bag of Crisps, as well as the fiction novel Empty Playgrounds. After a globe-trotting career as a corporate executive for giants such as AIG, Philips, and Bank of America, Strahan now lives in Hong Kong. An accomplished poet who describes himself as a storyteller rather than a writer, he continues to draw inspiration from everyday life, as well as from a wealth of experience gained from working in technology and traveling the world.

Can We Really See the World in a Fair and Unbiased Way? The Map Maker is the story of a young adventurer who travels to Paradise Island with the aid of a magical map. Here, he begins his own knowledge quest to better understand why people see the world just the way they do. Arguably, one of the most important traits any person can possess is the ability to see things from another person's point of view. This story shows how different people, with differing viewpoints, can each believe that his or her own viewpoint is reasonable and accurate. It offers an explanation as to why it is difficult, if not impossible, to judge events objectively. Using simple prose, this work introduces and explores the meaning behind the phrase the subjectivity of truth and the relativity of reality. A product of inspirational and literary fiction, The Map Maker will hold special appeal for readers interested in philosophy in fiction.

This short story will also introduce readers to the story line of the movie Rashomon. This Oscar-winning, Japanese foreign-language film was one of the first movies to present viewers with an account of multiple perspectives, in which each person who is called to testify at a trial gives conflicting testimony.

Author's bio: Brandon Royal is an award-winning writer whose educational authorship includes The Little Blue Reasoning Book, The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Gold Grammar Book, and The Little Green Math Book. During his tenure working in Hong Kong for US-based Kaplan Educational Centers -- a Washington Post subsidiary and the largest test-preparation organization in the world -- Brandon honed his theories of teaching and education and developed a set of key learning principles to help define the basics of writing, grammar, math, and reasoning. A Canadian by birth and graduate of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, his interest in writing began after completing fiction and scriptwriting courses at Harvard University. Since then he has authored a dozen books and reviews of his books have appeared in Time Asia magazine, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal of America, Midwest Book Review, The Asian Review of Books, Choice Reviews Online, Asia Times Online, and About.com. Brandon is a five-time winner of the International Book Awards, a seven-time gold medalist at the President's Book Awards, as well as recipient of the Educational Book of the Year award as presented by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. He has also been a winner or finalist at the Ben Franklin Book Awards, the Global eBook Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Awards, the IPPY Awards, the USA Book News Best Book Awards, and the Foreword magazine Book of the Year Awards. He continues to write and publish in the belief that there will always be a place for books that inspire, enlighten, and enrich.

Ace the GMAT is based on a simple but powerful observation: Test-takers who score high on the GMAT exam do so primarily by understanding how to solve a finite number of the most important, recurring problems that appear on the GMAT. What are these important, recurring problems? The answer to this question is the basis of this book. This manual provides in-depth analysis of over 200 all-star problems that are key to mastering the seven major GMAT problem types including Problem Solving, Data Sufficiency, Sentence Correction, Critical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, Analytical Writing, and Integrated Reasoning. Apart from providing readers with answers and full explanations, a special feature of this book is that each problem is categorized by type (classification), rated by difficulty level (chili rating), and supplemented with a problem-solving strategy (snapshot).

Whether you're a candidate already enrolled in a test-prep course or are undertaking self-study, this book will serve as a rigorous skill-building study guide to help you conquer the math, verbal, analytical writing, and integrated reasoning sections of the exam. Studying for the math and verbal sections of the GMAT exam requires some 100 hours of study time. This book's content is conveniently divided into topics, which require two to three hours of study time per day. Total study time will vary between 80 to 120 hours for the entire 40 days.

*Complete coverage of the math, verbal, analytical writing, and integrated reasoning sections.
*Track your progress using a specially designed 40-day checklist.
*Take ownership of your exam and gain the confidence you need by building real skills.
*Learn to identify the different types of math problems and the math concepts being tested.
*Master the key rules of grammar and review diction, idioms, and style.
*Use analytical techniques to avoid answer traps and to eliminate common wrong answer choices.
*Prepare for the Integrated Reasoning section with a targeted review of graphical data.

Secret Recipe: Each hand-selected problem comes with a classification, snapshot, and chili rating. Classification serves to identify each problem according to category or sub-category. Snapshot highlights why that particular problem was chosen, including the underlying problem-solving principle or strategic approach. Chili rating helps candidates gauge the estimated difficulty level of a given problem. A single chili indicates that the estimated difficulty level of a given problem is mild (500 to 590 difficulty level), two chilies spell hot (600 to 690 difficulty level), and three chilies signal very hot (700 or above difficulty level). By practicing with problems of varying levels of difficulty, candidates will learn to maintain discipline when solving easy but tricky problems and also to exercise flexibility when tackling harder problems. These latter problems require that a test-taker choose the best approach and look for time-saving shortcuts.

Author's bio: Brandon Royal (CPA, MBA) is an award-winning educational author and a graduate of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. This book represents, in part, his distilled experience gained from having taught GMAT test-prep courses for Kaplan Educational Centers in Hong Kong and from having conducted hundreds of hours of individual tutoring sessions that helped scores of applicants beat the GMAT and achieve acceptance at the world's leading business schools.

What do you get when you mix a dash of Roald Dahl, a sprinkle of Iron Chef, and a pinch of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution? Nothing less than a heaping helping of magical realism set against a culinary backdrop that allows young readers to immerse themselves in a recipe-filled, humorous story about adolescent friendship, healthy living, and cooking, with some fantasy thrown in for extra seasoning. Meet eleven-year-old Jerry Pasta, the youngest-ever student to begin Master Chef training at Pesto's International School of Culinary Excellence in Italy. Jerry is, to say the least, different- a mysterious accident with boiling cooking water turned his hair into pasta. Many in the cooking world have come to believe that Jerry is destined to be the saviory chef of prophecy . . . the one to save the world from fatty, unhealthy foods. But Jerry doesn't want that responsibility. He wants to just cook for fun and to support his family. And if that isn't enough on his plate, a powerful-and extremely dangerous-food critic who fears the prophecy is true sees Jerry as a roadblock on his path to world food domination. Add to this simmering mix, Pesto's mysterious janitor called Bones: he seems to show up whenever Jerry is in trouble-but why? During a summer of making friends-and enemies-from different countries, battling on the playing field of a food-fight tournament, and competing for cooking awards, Jerry must decide what type of chef and person he ultimately wants to be: original or ordinary.

It's time to declare war on wasted advertising...

• If you're tired of spending money on advertising with poor results...
• If you're sick of shiny objects and marketing gimmicks...
• If you wish someone would just tell you the truth about how it works...

...this book is for you. It's time to make a change.

Stop paying for bad advertising.

Stop settling for poor quality leads (or none at all).

The Maven Marketer is the no-nonsense guide, created from over a

decade on the front lines of small business marketing. Learn the exact

process Brandon Welch, Founder of Frank & Maven, has used to flood

his clients with new customers, skyrocket revenues, and change the

lives of business owners across the United States.

Brandon exposes the truth about the broken system of advertising in

America, why so many companies fail to grow to their fullest potential,

and how you can finally build a marketing plan that will launch your

company to new heights.

Conquer the challenges limiting your business and fast-track a plan for

marketing your way to millions.