I found myself using the word discombobulated several times recently, understandable in this age of pandemic/COVID-19. It was a word my father, also an English teacher and scholar, would use. After writing the recent post on wordsmiths and lexicographers, I was curious to turn to dictionaries, as well as thesauruses, to explore the meaning and …
Writers are wordsmiths, whether they are following the Queen’s English (“educated British”) or American Standard English (“professional style”) or the slang of contemporary music. This post is inspired by the recent deaths of two wordsmiths: one is the prominent Irish poet, Eavan Boland who shook up the poetical male field with her focus on a …
For a good, even great, book, writers need to revise, not edit. I’ve spent some time in recent posts, discussing revision – ways that grammar can help with syntactic and with stylistic revision – with making your sentences clearer and your language rhetorically effective. In these and in an earlier post, I considered the difference …
The previous post focused on how writers can use grammar to improve their writing style. Called stylistic or rhetorical grammar, writers can use their knowledge of grammar stylistic analysis, choices, and revision. Mark S. LeTourneau, in English Grammar, enumerated these three applications of grammar to style, with a focus on sentence combining to create complex, …
In this blog’s discussions of grammar and usage issues, we’ve looked at a wide variety of areas, including usage conventions, grammatical and punctuation “errors,” the history and evolving nature of the English language, and approaches to understanding its grammar. These considerations are necessarily brief, rather than comprehensive. But the goal has been to provide recommendations …
This post presents a brief overview of the history of English grammar instruction. I recently heard a discussion of how young people – Millennials and Generation Z – have not been taught American history, do not know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. I don’t know about this “decline” in …
History of English Grammar Instruction – An Overview Read More »
Did this post’s title make you look twice? In the locker room at the local YMCA this winter, I overheard an interesting discussion, where many such conversations take place on all sorts of topics, including books, current events, and life. Some members were bemoaning the decline in the use of the English language. What they …
In continuing the discussion of English grammar and language, this post examines how and why the English Language became perhaps the most influential linguistic medium the work has ever known. In addition to being the dominant language of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific …
In two earlier posts, we examined the grammar of the English sentence – both the unconscious knowledge of native speakers (What is grammar?) and the conscious application of grammar to the analysis of sentences through diagramming or linguistic trees (Parsing the English Sentence). Because native English speakers follow the rules of English grammar mostly unconsciously, …
I’m interrupting my series of posts on grammar to offer some writing challenges to readers and visitors of this blog. At any time, people need the comfort and challenge that writing can provide, but especially in this uncertain time of COVID-19 spread and pandemic worries and social distancing. My original title for this post was …