Nonsuch Book

quick and dirty tips

Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing by Mignon Fogarty is not just a great reference guide. It is also a really fun book, liberating in its no-nonsense, quick but thorough explanations of essential grammar and usage points. You will find yourself rapidly paging through looking for all those grammar questions that plague you as you write. Ever been so unsure of the proper way to phrase something  that you scrapped your sentence and came at it from another angle? Escape the uncertainty. Something you can't find in this text? Check out her website and search through posts and podcasts for the answer. Still can't find the answer? Write Fogarty. The author maintains that she would love to have more people correspond with her but many are afraid to expose their grammatical failings in view of the expert. She promises to stash the red pen while reading your inquiries.

For all of you still with me here, channeling your inner language geek, here are some indispensable  things you will find in the book:

• Farther Than You've Ever Gone Before: Further Versus Farther 
• How You Doin'?: Good Versus Well (might not be what you think) 
• Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep 
• I Want to Split Infinitives 
• If I Only Had a Brain: Misplaced Modifiers

And the fun goes on from there. Check it out. No one has to see you if you don't want. You can be a closet grammarian. 

let's hear it for the nuns

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences will not appeal to everyone, but if you went to school in the seventies (or before) and maybe were educated by a bunch of energetic Immaculate Heart of Mary nuns like I was, you have to read this book. It does not have the detailed rules of diagramming that some similar texts contain, but it does hold enough info to prompt you to re-examine your own skills as a grammarian. The humor is light and engaging. The diagrams are all hand-written which further adds to the charm here. What really hooked me though was the long list of memories that this little volume brought back to me. As I read, I could almost hear Sister Michael Mary reviewing the placement of a gerund in a diagram. This post is short because I need to go out for some supplies - a 12-inch ruler, red pen, black pen, lots of wide-ruled paper.