My New Book's Out Today!

It's called It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences.

It teaches how to improve writing at the sentence level. I based it largely on the writing problems I see in my copy editing work. It talks about upside-down subordination, passives, weak verb choices, weak noun choices, how to pare down flabby prose, how adverbs can backfire on a writer, and more issues that make good writing go bad.

I also use real-life examples of badly written sentences (many of them by professionals) and show how to break them down into parts and rebuild them better.

Here are links on Powell's, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Borders, and IndieBound.

It Was the Best of Sentences scored back-cover endorsements from literary agent and author extraordinaire Donald Maass (author of The Fire in Fiction), Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty (author of Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing), and Elizabeth Little (author of Biting the Wax Tadpole, which, by the way, is a fascinating read for anyone interested in foreign languages).

I really hope It Was the Best of Sentences will help some struggling writers become great writers!

It's National Grammar Day!

Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty and Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier author Bonnie Trenga, with, I think, an assist from Things that Make Us [Sic] author Martha Brockenbrough, have cooked up some fun stuff to promote grammar at http://nationalgrammarday.com/.

Yesterday, I learned, was Girls Day. I learned about it at a bookstore appearance by friend and author Naomi Hirahara, who was at Vroman's in Pasadena celebrating the release of her newest Mas Aria mystery, Blood Hina.

My Resistance to 'They' with a Non-Gender-Specific Singular Antecedent: Going, Going ...

The other day in my column, I ran an interview with Grammar Girl, the queen of the grammar podcast and my new e-friend. Her real name is Mignon Fogarty and she has a new book out, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.

The column was a Q&A with her, which I trimmed down to column length. Soon after, I got an e-mail from Fred in Southern California:

Your interview with Mignon Fogarty interested but puzzled me. I’m sure that
she must understand the principle of agreement of a pronoun with its antecedent;
yet, in response to your question “Do you get grief from grammar snobs?” she
responds, “…the more rude someone is, the more likely they are to be wrong”
[italics added]. Would it be rude of me to request a word of comment about her
inconsistency?

I wrote Fred back. But it didn’t occur to me until just now how two-faced I can be in situations like this. My column readers seem a very different set from the people who see my blog. The column appears in little community news sections that cover city hall votes and school plays. People who read it tend to be older and more traditional. People with names like Fred and Rose. You know -- people who scare me. So I tend to sugar-coat my responses: “Yes, traditionally you’re right. But authorities are loosening their standards on this stuff. Blah, blah …”

The truth is, I believe that this rule is almost dead. The word “they” and its corresponding forms might not appear in the dictionary with the definition “he or she” yet. But I think they will soon. It has clearly become the most popular alternative to saying “he or she” in every sentence.

It’s a “skunked” usage right now: It’s in transition from being considered wrong to being considered right. Which means that lots of people who were taught it’s wrong will stand by that teaching. Understandably so.

Still, if anyone wants that rule to live forever, they are probably going to end up disappointed.

(Now I'm off to check whether I edited out of the Q&A any discussion of this what would have explained it before Fred fired up is computer! I'll probably run the full Q&A here soon, once the papers who carry my column have all had a chance to run it.)