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Elise Hahl on the birth of English grammar

By on September 22, 2010 in Talking Syntax

Businesspeople speak it. Academics understand it. Johnny Depp steams it up.

English looks so hot today that it’s hard to imagine it as anything but the homecoming king of global languages. But it wasn’t always so. Curious about the true story of our language’s past, I found myself studying a few musty old texts and contemplating Latin for the first time since high school. That took me back. I soon realized that high school gave me a pretty good metaphor for what I was learning. For if, at turn of the 18th century, all European languages made up a high school, English was the kid with the thick glasses and the “Kick Me” sign on his back.

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A Punctuation Primer

By on December 26, 2009 in Talking Syntax, Uncategorized

Whole books—lots of them—have been written about punctuation, and I believe it would take an entire semester to teach writers all the ins and outs of parentheses, the slips and slides of slashes, hyperbolic reactions of the language mavens to simple hyphens.

Karen Elizabeth Gordon defines punctuation rhetorically: “What is it, after all, but another way of cutting up cutting up time, creating or negating relationships, telling words when to take a rest, when to get on with their relentless stories, when to catch their breath?”

Here is a brief primer on this confounding subject.

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Secrets for Sinful Prose

By on September 27, 2009 in Talking Syntax

Whether you’re a floodgates-open writer or a blocked writer, remember: the first draft is for just getting the ideas down. It’s in the revising that we sift through our words, letting only the most perfect specimens adorn the thread of syntax. These “secrets of sinfully good prose” will help you banish the potatoes and burnish the pearls.

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Seven Deadly Sins

By on September 27, 2009 in Talking Syntax

Most of us also sense we missed some lessons along the way. But few of us can claim Joan Didion’s ear. It can take years to master the nuances of syntax, but it doesn’t take long to learn a few critical basics.

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Punctuation: Pet Peeves

By on August 27, 2009 in Talking Syntax

Imagine a paragraph as a musical score with punctuation marks as the rests that tell us when, and how long, to pause. Think of the comma as an eighth rest, the colon as a quarter rest, the semi-colon a half rest, and the period a whole rest.

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