Susan Sommers Thurman is an American English teacher, grammarian, and the author of The Only Grammar Book You'll Ever Need: A One-Stop Source for Every Writing Assignment (Adams Media, 2003; updated edition Simon and Schuster, 2024), one of the most consistently in-print grammar references for working writers, students, and business professionals of the past two decades. She has taught English grammar at every level from junior high school through community college and is on the faculty of Henderson Community College in Henderson, Kentucky, where she lives on the banks of the Ohio River with her husband Mike.
The Only Grammar Book You'll Ever Need works through the working machinery of English in a tight reference format: parts of speech, the elements of a sentence, punctuation (the comma, the colon, the dash, the apostrophe, the working semicolon), the most common grammar and punctuation mistakes made by working adult writers, sentence-level clarity, paragraph-level organization, and the workflow for approaching a writing project of any size. The updated 2024 edition adds fresh examples and quizzes for the global English-as-a-second-language audience. The Only Grammar and Style Workbook You'll Ever Need (Adams Media, 2012) is the working companion exercise book.
She edits and publishes Class Act, a national magazine for English teachers featuring grammar, writing instruction, and classroom ideas, and has written more than fifty articles on English instruction along with a working library of study guides for grammar and composition courses. Her writing across her career covers the working overlap of education, language arts, and regional history.
