Blog

My musings on the craft, with kudos for brilliant writing and scorn for bonehead errors.

Laying down the line

By on March 4, 2013 in Blog

It being National Grammar Day (What? You didn’t know there was a National Grammar Day?), I thought I would have a little fun with one of my grammar pet peeves.

This pet peeve comes up every time I take my favorite yoga class, because my teacher ends the class by saying, “Now lay on your backs for shavasana.” It’s enough to make this corpse turn in the grave. He should say now lie on your backs.

The distinction between lay and lie is not that hard, and I spend some ink on it both in Sin and Syntax and in Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch. You just need to understand that there are transitive verbs (which take direct objects) and intransitive verbs (which don’t.)

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Writing about writing

By on January 3, 2013 in Blog

Writing about writing is tough. On the one hand you want to be helpful and accessible. On the other hand, you want to be smart and sophisticated—you want to inspire readers. I love it when writing about writing makes the reader feel smart, and appeals to the genuine word lover. My thoughts on that, as well as a word on a great writers retreat…

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The truth about the tour

By on November 27, 2012 in Blog

You know the myth of the book tour—an author gets whisked around the country, chauffeured to events, taken to Chez Panisse. Yeah, right. The truth is, unless you are a marquee name or a perennial bestseller, there is no tour. Or at least not one the publisher pays for. But some of us hold on to the myth, or are gluttons for punishment, or just love the chance to vagabond it around the country with our bound babies. So we buy cheap plane tickets, bunk with friends, and hawk our wares in any bookstore that will have us.

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Free verse, free verbs

By on October 27, 2012 in Blog

A friend sends some lively coinages by John Clare (1793-1864)—described by poet Robert Hass as “a poet-peasant naturalist among the Romantic poets.” This leads me to reflect on the nature of English and our love of neologisms–whether Clare’s soodle or today’s google.

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My crush on verbs

By on September 28, 2012 in Blog

How can a person write a whole book just on verbs? Is she crazy? If not, then why has no one else done it before her? When I looked into it, I found a market ripe for an entertaining book on action words. But that’s not why I wanted to write “Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch.” I just had a lot to say about getting tense and being moody, about static sentences and dynamic ones, about the much-maligned passive voice, and about all those myths out there about language generally.

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Second to None

By on September 6, 2012 in Blog

I love it when somebody really smart corrects me. Most recently, the “somebody really smart” was Patricia O’Conner, the author of several books, including “Woe Is I” and one of my all-time favorite usage books, “Origins of the Specious.” Pat read the galleys of “Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch” and found a small error that would have turned my face carnelian had it made through page proofs and into print.

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Slow food, slow travel, slow writing

By on July 6, 2012 in Blog

A reader of my New York Times columns asked whether I might devote a post to a subject he has been struggling with: “being a painfully slow writer.” It’s no wonder writers are looking for ways to cut corners—or to cut to the chase. But I have to confess: I’m not a fast writer. The articles and books have piled up, and I have a good chunk of experience behind me, but I don’t feel “prolific,” either.

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Dangle these in front of a grammarian!

By on May 31, 2012 in Blog

After my essay “Turning a Phrase” ran in The New York Times Opinionator area, I invited members of my Sin and Syntax mailing list to send me their favorite dangling modifiers. And I promised to award a book to the sender of the one that most tickled my funny bone.

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The English Wars

By on May 23, 2012 in Blog

My New York Times posts have stirred the ire of certain linguists and reminded me of how journalists and academics can often seem as much at odds as Democrats and Republicans in Congress. (I could have used a little less condescension in the comments after the post on “Make or Break Verbs,” especially since a linguist on a blog misread one line, but—oh well.) Here are links to clue you in to the epic prescriptivist-descriptivist debate.

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The Sky Is the Limit

By on April 30, 2012 in Blog

Have you been reading the “Draft” series, online at The New York Times’ Opinionator? At the end of my essay on nouns and adjectives, I mentioned that one of the most difficult things to describe is the sky. It’s hard to avoid clichés and to see in a fresh way. I invited readers to to try their hands at a little descriptive writing, and many readers posted their own skyscapes. Some readers sent me their favorite passages from literature through this Web site. I wanted to share some of them, as well as another I’ve kept in my back pocket.

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