Serial Commas, Subordinate Clauses, and the New Yorker
Mary Norris has a gift for your favorite grammarian in this week’s New Yorker: a detailed account of comma policy from a veteran copyeditor. The magazine is notorious for its…
Posts by tag
grammar
51 posts
For the Love of Good Grammar
Bryan Henderson has made more than 47,000 edits to Wikipedia. This prolific career is not the product of Henderson’s great breath of knowledge, but rather because he has an obsession…
Creativity Is Messy
Technically perfect writing is important when it comes to journalism or nonfiction, and especially helpful when writing with short deadlines. Fiction writing is different though. Nicole Bernier, over at Beyond…
The Rules are There
In his new book The Sense of Style, brain scientist Steven Pinker calls for a relaxation of English grammar rules. While the Daily Beast’s review praises Pinker for rejecting the…
Grammar As You Like It
Everybody has that one friend who insists they know good grammar. They’re probably wrong—Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker insists strict rules just don’t matter because language is fluid. Mother Jones…
Everything in Its Right Place
The rules come so naturally to us that we rarely learn about them in school, but over the past few decades language nerds have been monitoring modifiers, grouping them into…
Tripping on Pronouns
Even if you know what is a pronoun and what “gender” means, you’ll want to read this linguistic time-tripping essay on the link that ties the part of speech to…
In Defense of Adverbs
Adverbs are bad, every writer has been told, repeatedly. Use them sparingly, if at all, is the advice commonly given. But adverbs do serve a purpose, and more often it…
The Artful Sentence of Denis Johnson
Sentence construction. That’s all a writer does anyhow, right? Not all sentences are made with great care and hold sentiments like this one: There is something artful and sad in…
The Decline of Punctuation?!…
We live in a heyday of punctuation. “Call this what you will—exclamatory excess, punctuation inflation, the result of the Internet’s limitless expanse—it is everywhere,” writes Megan Garber at the Atlantic.…
Go Ahead, Break Some Grammar Rules
It’s actually the opposite. Most people break grammar rules so they can be more precise. For Full Stop, Catie Disabato writes about prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar, and why “bad” grammar…
When Grammar Becomes Dangerous
Those who are careful about their grammar run the risk of seeming pretentious. Strict adherence to grammar rules is sometimes written off as stuffy and elitist. There is a greater…