Anne Curzan

It might seem odd to rate a non-fiction book so very highly, but this book took what I was expecting from it (language & grammar lessons) and then turned the dial up to twelve. I expected it to be about grammar rules in the way that the many other books about grammar rules I've read have been written: sometimes funny, sometimes dry, and always, always about the rule. This one tells you when to break the rule, which would have been a bonus by itself. But then it also goes into the whys about show more some of the rules, and shows examples of when those rules were made to separate us from them. And that made this book so much better than I had expected.

I've technically been reading this book for a loooong time—officially just under a year, in fact. However, that's because I was enjoying reading a chapter, then pausing to let it sink in, then reading another chapter later. It's not a book I was reading daily; it's one I was coming back to when I needed it. I think I would have enjoyed it less if I'd tried to binge read it. For me, part of the pleasure of this book was in the coming back to it after a week of reading just fiction. Another part of the joy of this book is that it's kind, which not all of the other grammar books I've read have been.

And finally, it's so very quotable. I ended up returning the library book I'd started with and getting a copy of my own just so that I could highlight all the quotes I liked. show less

I was tolerably familiar with much of the subject matter, but the presentation was excellent. I would happily listen to it again. (She exploded "laser" into its constituent words incorrectly, and made a few other errors that I can't remember anymore. But these are minor problems.) I enjoyed her discussion of spoken versus written English and promptly noticed "gonna" appearing in some dialogue in a novel I was reading. I would never have noticed it otherwise. The speaker in the novel is an show more American, although the period is during WWI. Is "gonna" really that old, or was the writer indulging in an anachronism for effect? Guess I will have to listen to those lectures again! show less

I used to be a grammar snob ("grammando" as per the author) until I realized that it was a form of white middle-class privilege. Fortunately, linguist and professor Anne Curzan is here to affirm the error of my ways. She carefully describes the origin of our prescriptive grammar rules (usually arbitrarily decided by white men), compares them with commonalities in 21st century English, and reminds us that languages are constantly evolving. The book starts with the verbing of "impact," and show more then snappily moves on to other Grammando Hall of Shame entries, e.g., ending a sentence with a preposition; its vs. it's; the infamous Oxford comma, etc. Throughout, Curzan makes a plea for tolerance of, even appreciation for, many of the words and phrases that cause our inner grammando to cringe.

I still feel my blood pressure rise when I see "less" instead of "fewer" in august publications like The New York Times, but thanks to Dr. Curzan I no longer consider it a sign of the apocalypse. show less

This is a very good usage guide for the modern editor and language nerd. It explains why and how people can be prescriptive about certain grammatical constructions, and how many of these constructions are actually perfectly grammatical; they're just not considered "standard English". I liked how Curzan brought in experiences from her writing classes and her own actual writing and how she changed her point of view.