Writers and editors throw the term narrative journalism around loosely, and many don’t really know how to define it. Here’s my own short definition: narrative journalism is reported nonfiction that uses the techniques of fiction to enliven the story. Those techniques might include scene-setting, character sketches, and extended dialogue (rather than quotes gathered through interviews). A work of narrative journalism requires an artful structure that gives the story an arc or some kind of dramatic progression. The writer is present as a narrator and not just as an invisible, objective witness.

Here is a sampling of some of the best works of narrative journalism that have been published in books. (Get reading!)

Collections of Narrative Journalism

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. Beacon Press 1984 (original published in 1955).

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Non-fiction by Joan Didion. Everyman’s Library 2006

The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now by Alma Guillermoprieto. Vintage 1994.

Talk Stories by Jamaica Kincaid, with a foreword by Ian Frazier. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2001.

The Sweet Science by A.J. Liebling. North Point Press 2004 (original, 1956).

The John McPhee Reader by John McPhee (Edited by William L. Howarth). Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1982.

Fame and Obscurity by Gay Talese. Ivy Books 1995 (original, 1970).

Anthologies of Narrative Journalism

The Best American Magazine Writing edited by the American Society of Magazine Editors. Columbia University Press annual series

Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America’s Best Writing 1979-2003 edited by David Garlock. Wiley-Blackwell 2003.

The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism by Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda. Scribner 1997.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present edited by Phillip Lopate. Anchor 1997 (original, 1994).

The Princeton Anthology of Writing edited by John McPhee and Carol Rigolot. Princeton University Press 2001.

Best American Essays of the Century by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan. Houghton Mifflin 2000.

Best Newspaper Writing edited by the Poynter Institute. Poynter Institute Press annual series

New York Stories: Landmark Writing from Four Decades of New York Magazine edited by Tom Wolfe and the editors of New York Magazine. Random House 2008.

Book-Length Works of Narrative Journalism

Black Man’s America by Simeon Booker. Prentice Hall, out of print (originally published in 1964).

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Vintage 1994 (first published in 1966).

The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro. Alfred A. Knopf, three volumes to date (first volume originally published in 1982).

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass. Available online at www.gutenberg.org/etext/23 (original published in 1845).

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1997.

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch. Picador 1998.

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam. Ballantine 1993 (original, 1972).

Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner 1996 (original, 1932).

Hiroshima by John Hersey. Vintage 1989 (originally published in 1946).

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild. Houghton Mifflin 1998.

The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes. Vintage 1987.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Bay Back Books 2000 (original, 1981).

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian LeBlanc. Scribner 2003.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. W.W. Norton & Co. 2003.

The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music by Steve Lopez. Putnam Adult 2008.

Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail by Ruben Martinez. Picador USA 2001.

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov. Vintage 1989 (original, 1966).

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. Ballantine Books 1999.

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner. Penguin 1993 (original, 1986).

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Simon & Schuster 1995 (original, 1986).

Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,. Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2007 (full version originally published in 1989).

Remembering Denny by Calvin Trillin, with foreword by John Gregory Dunne. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005 (original, 1993).

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. Presidio Press 2004 (original, 1962).

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. Penguin Classics 2007 (original, 1941).

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. Picador 2008 (original, 1979).

Having trouble remembering when to use who and whom? Confused by which and that? Want to bone up on the parts of a sentence? Well, hie thee to a bookstore and buy Sin and Syntax, which will also tell you how deploy these grammatical fine points to write “wicked good prose.” If you hunger for more, here are my favorite grammar guides—from the geeky to the goofy.

A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, edited by Randolph Quirk. (Essex: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1985). The dean of British grammarians, led the team that produced this behemoth, which will tell you everything—I mean everything—about grammar. Let the buyer beware: this book is expensive, but worth it.

The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. This masterpiece of Gothic humor and racy sentences might be called “grammar for grownups,” or, as Gordon suggests, for “the innocent, the eager, and the doomed.”

When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, by Ben Yagoda. (New York: Broadway, 2007). Yagoda’s tweak on Mark Twain’s famous admonition gives a hint to his treatment of grammar: witty. His table of contents shows what he focuses on: the parts of speech, period.

Woe Is I, by Patricia T. O’Conner. (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1996) Less comprehensive than the books listed above, O’Conner nevertheless takes the reader on a clear-headed stroll through the labyrinth that is English. She manages to amuse, too, in chapters with names like “Comma Sutra: The Joy of Punctuation” and “The Compleat Dangler: A Fish out of Water.”

I’m a big fan of books, and I love, love, love my library. That’s where I go first when I have language questions. But maybe you’re on the road, or you just love to surf the Web. Here are some online resources that I have found to be both credible and helpful when it comes to grammar questions.

Barbara Wallraff reigns at Word Court. I’ve always admired Barbara’s approach to grammar and usage, which is impeccably informed, never opaque, and quietly witty. Barbara is also the author of Word Court: Wherein Verbal Virtue Is Rewarded, Crimes Against the Language Are Punished, and Poetic Justice Is Done, Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words, and Your Own Words.

Grammar Girl, aka Mignon Fogarty, promises “quick and dirty tips for better writing.” Her site is part of a gimmicky branding scheme—other “Quick and Dirty” sites give you advice on parenting (“Kids and Naps”), pets (“What to Do About Your Humping Dog”) and protecting your capital (“How to Short Sell a Stock”). But the Grammar Girl podcasts are serious stuff. Each podcast deals with one grammar dilemma, often spawned by an emailed. The typical podcast lasts only a few minutes, and is friendly but credible. (It usually includes multiple citations.) The transcripts are posted on the Web site, so you can read along as Fogarty breezes past “between” and settles on “how to use semicolons.”

Long before there was Grammar Girl there was The Slot, which began in August 1995 as the Crusty Old Slot Man’s Copy-Editing Peeve Page. Its creator is Bill Walsh, a copy editor at The Washington Post. Walsh’s day job shapes the issues he covers on his two sites—The Slot and Blogslot—and his two books, Lapsing into a Comma and The Elephants of Style.

Common Errors in English by Paul Brians isn’t much to look at, but the no-frills, alphabetical listings allows you to go straight to whatever word is vexing you. An emeritus English professor at Washington State University, Brians gives simple pronouncements on everything from “a/an” to “zoology” and he denounces the falsehoods that Miss Thistlebottoms and Old Curmudgeons brainlessly insist upon.

The lively blog at Language Hat is maintained by a former student of historical linguistics who was born in Tokyo, grew up in various hemispheres, and ended up an editor in Manhattan. (He prefers to remain anonymous and gives tidbits of his bio under the clever “my hats” link, which is literally about his collection of hats.) This is really a site about language more than grammar or writing, and includes links to the Boston Globe column called “The Word,” the sci.lang FAQ, the Dictionary of the Scots Language, and The Kanji Site.

The tagline of Motivated Grammar—Prescriptivism Must Die!—gives you an idea of its slant. The creation of Gabe Doyle, a graduate student in Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego, it’s a bit geeky—more linguistics jousting than guide to good writing. Doyle describes himself as a computational psycholinguist, which means that he uses computers to model how people think about language. He says his purpose is to “set the record straight”—to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn’t.

There are a gazillion dictionaries out there, and some are much more respected than other. Many people think “Webster’s” is the key word, but it’s actually meaningless; what matters is the publisher and its reputation for lexicography. Here’s a roundup on the dictionaries editors tend to favor, with a bit of explanation as to why.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (just released in its 11^th edition). This is the dictionary most often used by copy editors at magazines and books, for its careful lexicography and usage notes.

Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third Edition. This dictionary preferred by many newspapers, because it tends to add terms more rapidly, so it gives newspapers a way of being consistent in their pages.

American Heritage Dictionary. This is a favorite of many wordsmiths, for its extensive usage notes.

Random House Unabridged Dictionary. If you’ve got a huge budget and a big bookshelf, this is a wonderful dictionary to have in addition to either MW 11 or Webster’s New World.

Oxford English Dictionary. If you’ve got an even huger budget and a bigger bookshelf, go for this 20+ volume dictionary, which includes citations all the way back to Beowulf. This is one for real dictionary snobs: The citations go back as far as the dictionary researchers can trace a word, so you can see how Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain used it. It has even been the subject of a bestseller, The Madman and the Dictionary, by Simon Winchester. (Oxford also publishes smaller dictionaries, which are reputable, but not usually preferred by American publishers.)

Some people put thesauruses in a category with the pegasuarus–that is, extinct. But not me! The thesaurus (the one on my bookshelf, not the one in Microsoft Word) is my favorite tool. Why? because I’m an absolute fiend about finding the right word, and I need help to do it.

Be aware of the difference between “Roget’s style” and “dictionary style” thesauruses or “synonym finders.” The latter two are arranged alphabetically; the former uses an index in the back and numbered entries in the front. A Roget’s involves multiple steps (looking up a word in the back index, and then turning to various ones of the numbered citations), but yields many more possible synonyms and will inspire you to find the perfect word.

As with dictionaries, the key is to go with a reliable publisher, in addition to finding a Roget’s style thesaurus.

Most writers think that style refers to the way we write, the flair and artistry we bring to words on the page. But in the publishing world, editors and copy editors use the term to refer to the very particular way they treat certain words–putting book titles in italics, say, or using O.K. rather than okay. If you intend to write for publication, it may be useful to pick up one or more of the following books.

The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law. This is the standard in newsrooms all around the country. Journalists love it for its easy-to-use A to Z organization. Also included is a primer on libel and other legal issues. Many individual newspapers have their own style manuals, which add local place names or idioms to the A.P. list of terms.

The Chicago Manual of Style, Fifteenth Edition. This is the manual preferred by magazine and book publishers. The new addition has badly needed advice on handling how to deal with Web sites, URLs, and the like.

MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers and the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing are the authorities in academia, when it comes to style. They are published by the Modern Language Association. MLA style focuses especially on documenting scholarly borrowings for writing on language and literature. It has been widely adopted by schools, academic departments, and instructors for over half a century, as well as more than 1,100 scholarly and literary journals, newsletters, and university and commercial presses throughout North America and in Brazil, China, India, Japan, Taiwan, and other countries.

Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. This slender volume broke ground in 1996 when its creators at Wired magazine called it “a beautiful object, a useful tool” for its florescent packaging and comprehensive list of Internet words. It was envisioned as a complement to AP and Chicago, which for a long time did not address the kinds of questions made burning by the Internet. A new version in 1999 included an essay on writing in the age of email. Both volumes are out of print by are available from Constance Hale, who edited them.

Usage guides don’t define words as a dictionary does, and they don’t tell you how to capitalize words or where to put hyphens as a style manual does. Instead they explain the way we use words in English, and the subtle differences between certain words (e.g., affect and effect) that are often confused.

Dictionary of Modern American Usage. (Oxford University Press, 2003). At 928 pages, this comprehensive and complete book represents the gold standard to many in the trade. Its author, Bryan Garner, has been called “the wunderkind of American dictionary-making.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. (Merriam-Webster, 1994). Of the many usage manuals on the market, copy editors often prefer this one, as they do its cousin in the dictionary department. Authoritative, comprehensive, and easy to read, it follows a “descriptive” rather than a “prescriptive” philosophy.

The Careful Writer. (New York: Atheneum, 1977). Theodore M. Bernstein first put together this glossary of stylistic snares in 1965, after a long career as an editor at the New York Times. Bernstein writes oh-so-cleanly, and with occasional sly humor, about usage, which he calls the “spit and polish” that gives writing precision, accuracy, clarity, and color.

The Accidents of Style. (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010). Another book for those who love splitting hairs—and splitting infinitives. In other words, writers who care about nuance and can tell which false rules deserve to be flouted. Charles Harrington Elster updates The Careful Writer, writing smartly about more than 350 other thorny usage questions.