Language Rock Star: Mignon Fogarty

I am currently on a quest to read every grammar, usage, and copyediting book in the office, because reasons. I started simple, with a volume from the “Quick and Dirty Tips” line, The Grammar Devotional: Daily Tips for Successful Writing from Grammar Girl, by Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl. This book is set up so you read one grammar or usage tip per day, thereby taking a year to read a book that’s less than 250 pages long. Not happening. I am in fact rather embarrassed that it took me about six weeks to get through this, because I was keeping it on my desk and trying to read a couple of tips every day, and then had to work from home for half of February.

In addition to the actual author photo of Fogarty in the back of the book, the front of the book features a cute cartoony avatar of the “Grammar Girl” persona, a bookish-looking brunette white girl with glasses. I assume this is meant to make the book look relatable to the 80 percent or so of the editorial field that is brunette white girls with glasses. Like, I’m assuming it’s supposed to be a cartoon of Fogarty, but it could be a cartoon of me, or Colleen, or Linsey, or Lisa, to name four of the five editors in our pod.

Anyway. The book itself is really good, breaking down a miscellany of grammar and usage issues into small, clearly-explained bits, making it both a good grammar guide and an excellent illustration of what’s meant by the detestable term “snackable content.” The reader’s main companions in illustrating the various issue at hand are Aardvark, who I assume is an aardvark; Squiggly, who seems to be a snail; Grammar Girl herself; and the nefarious peeves, who look kind of like a cross between small turtles and fat stripey gummy bears. The examples also draw heavily from pop culture and more-or-less-current events. It’s not quite The Transitive Vampire, but the example sentences are still a lot more fun and memorable than most school grammar textbooks (not that that’s a very high bar).

Not every day’s entry is a straight-up language lesson, though—about one day a week features a word game, like a word search or a jumble, and many of the Wednesdays are devoted to short profiles of “Language Rock Stars,” important or influential people in the history of English grammar study, development, and documentation. Some of these rock stars go way back (Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster) and others are linguists, writers, and editors who are currently active. (Some of them are also people whom I personally consider confused hacks, like William “I Once Reprimanded a Newspaper for Using Newspaper Style” Strunk, but I can’t pretend that they weren’t influential. Unfortunately.)

Overall, this book is well-researched, useful, easy to understand, and a good balance of actual usable advice (most of it) and things that are just fun to know (just enough). And the index means it actually is usable as a reference book, even though the body of it is structured to be pleasing to read through rather than to find a specific topic. Huzzah indexes! (Sadly not “indices.”)

I needed this book, exclamation mark.

I borrowed June Casagrande’s The Best Punctuation Book, Period from a girl at my office, and so far, it is indeed the best punctuation book I have found. The first half breaks down every punctuation mark in English, with one chapter devoted to each, and covers nearly every conceivable way each one can be used. As you would expect, the chapter on hyphens is the longest. It’s easy to navigate, as each chapter has a gray tab with the mark in question in the outside margin, making it easy to find the mark you’re looking for by thumbing through the book. The discussions and example sentences are clean, clear, and easy-to-follow, and breaks down how the usage varies by the four major publishing styles (news, book, academic, and scientific). For thornier questions, the author also put together a Punctuation Panel of expert editors, who all give their opinions, and the book discusses on what issues the panel is split and along what style lines (if any), etc. The back half of the book is a giant alphabetical reference table of punctuated words and phrases, marked with little icons for each style they apply to. The author has a light touch in terms of voice, but most of the book is “meat” with very little in the way of asides or jokes. This is exactly as it should be, though—it’s really a reference book, and it has come in useful for me on several occasions already.

Elephants, snark, and usage advice

I admit, I was prepared to be annoyed when I first picked up Bill Walsh’s The Elephants of Style, given that its name is a shout-out to what I’m pretty sure is the least helpful book on English usage in the language. (I know many people have found it helpful, but those people are not word nerds. If you say you found it helpful, I’m glad for you, but I’m also not going to view you as having any credibility if you start to try and talk language or writing stuff.) I was additionally apprehensive when Walsh started off by proclaiming himself a prescriptivist. But he assures us he is a reasonable prescriptivist, and so I gave him a chance. And mostly, he is quite reasonable—he’s in a position of giving advice, so he must by necessity prescribe do’s and don’ts (and yes, that’s the correct use of apostrophes in “do’s and don’ts”; we all hate it, too), but he also really knows his stuff, and is pretty up-front about when his peeves are his own peeves that he has developed through the application of logic, which is a thing with a pretty limited role in language. While he wears the curmudgeonly thing as a persona, the book is situated firmly in the “make them remember it by making it funny” school of teaching, rather than the regular boring elitism that so unfortunately plagues much grammar and usage “advice.”

Walsh is a newspaper copy chief, so while his advice runs to “newspaper style” in some ways that are not always applicable to everything, his main goal seems to be making things as readable as possible, rather than, say, showing off how articulate you are (which is, sadly, the goal of a lot of other self-described prescriptivists). And this book has a lot of really solid advice on how to do that, including areas where he advises throwing out or working around certain aspects of “technical correctness” to get more natural-sounding sentences (what one of my creative writing teachers called “invisible writing”). And it doesn’t spend a lot of time rehashing the basics—it’s pretty much all about the “elephants in the room” of writing; the bits people actually get confused about or about which there’s no consensus. He’s also got some useful, if scathing, advice about the “flair, panache” definition of style, like a list of the most tired tropes to use in an introduction.

Overall, it’s very silly, but solid as an elephant.

It's "doughnut" with "ough" but "drive-thru" with just "u."

Stylebooks aren’t necessarily meant to be read all the way through, any more than the dictionary is. They’re reference books, and they’re meant to be used so you just look up the bit you like. But as many dorky people end up reading the dictionary straight through (I was never one of them, which I am actually a bit surprised at), I like to read most reference books I have to use straight through, to get a more complete idea of what exactly is in it and a better feel for what and where I need to look things up. Which means I really ought to have finished reading The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law 2011 several months ago, instead of just looking around in it for things.

As far as I am concerned, the AP Stylebook does not hold a candle to the Chicago Manual of Style, either in terms of its organization or its editorial decisions. It’s organized alphabetically, like a dictionary, except for the bits that are separated off into their own sections, apparently just because the editors feel like it. There is a separate punctuation section, but no separate grammar section. There is a separate social media section, but not a separate politics or government section. The alphabetical stuff can be difficult for looking up grammar questions because you don’t always know what aspect of the question it’s filed under, whereas with the CMoS you can almost always just look at the table of contents and immediately figure out the one or two places it’s most likely to be. The grammar and usage bits are often short, which you’d think would be useful because it means they don’t make a whole lot of exceptions to things, but often just means that your answer isn’t addressed explicitly and you have to read through their examples to see if a similar construction is used as an example. And there is a sad lack of tables.

That said, you can still learn a lot from reading it, because it has entries discussing the proper ways to report on a wide variety of random things that get reported on, so it’s a great collection of random facts. The sections discussing media law and ethics are also really interesting, as are some of the longer entries that discuss news issues at greater length. There’s also a surprising amount of discussion of words’ histories, which is always fascinating.

What there is not, and what I would have found very useful, is a short discussion of style and structure on an article level, and a breakdown of the sort of journalistic jargon that you probably don’t want to actually use in the story itself (for example, there is no entry for “nut graph”). I suppose journalists are already supposed to know that stuff, but I’d like to have a short cheat sheet at my fingertips anyway.
Most of it was a fairly enjoyable read, still, because I’m a dork like that.