bloodygranuaile (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bloodygranuaile) wrote2016-05-09 07:04 pm
bloodygranuaile) wrote2016-05-09 07:04 pm
Entry tags:
Editorial melodrama
While I've been doing a fair bit of reading on the gambling end of my current field, I've been pretty neglectful about keeping up on any sort of writing or editing-related reading. But it's been a full year since my last binge of editing books, so I did try to find the time to make sure I hadn't forgotten how punctuation works by zipping through Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed. Gordon is also the author of my old favorite grammar book The Transitive Vampire, of which I own a copy that my mother once rescued from a library weeding. I'm fairly certain I also have a copy of the old version of The Well-Tempered Sentence around somewhere, but I'm not sure if I've ever read it.
I did not really learn anything new from The New Well-Tempered Sentence, which is good, as it means I have not been radically wrong about anything too basic regarding punctuation and that I have not lost my mind about any of it either. (It is important to stop and check periodically, though, when you're in my line of work. JUST IN CASE.) The level of the material is not substantially more complex than what you would expect to be learning at a high school level. That is, of course, not really the point of any of Gordon's works. The point is that it is full of delightfully wacky example sentences—many of which are not really appropriate to what you would expect to be seeing in a pre-collegiate level class—and many old illustrations (from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Victorian line drawings) with humorous captions. My favorite bit comes in the list of uses for italics, where the different types of emphasis you can use italics to add are enumerated, and include "for unrequited platonic love" and "for special effect in social repartee."
Whether the melodramatic example sentences make it easier to remember the punctuation rules or not is something I cannot entirely weigh in on; I would have to ask someone who did not already remember the punctuation rules before reading the book and see if their retention had improved.
I did not really learn anything new from The New Well-Tempered Sentence, which is good, as it means I have not been radically wrong about anything too basic regarding punctuation and that I have not lost my mind about any of it either. (It is important to stop and check periodically, though, when you're in my line of work. JUST IN CASE.) The level of the material is not substantially more complex than what you would expect to be learning at a high school level. That is, of course, not really the point of any of Gordon's works. The point is that it is full of delightfully wacky example sentences—many of which are not really appropriate to what you would expect to be seeing in a pre-collegiate level class—and many old illustrations (from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Victorian line drawings) with humorous captions. My favorite bit comes in the list of uses for italics, where the different types of emphasis you can use italics to add are enumerated, and include "for unrequited platonic love" and "for special effect in social repartee."
Whether the melodramatic example sentences make it easier to remember the punctuation rules or not is something I cannot entirely weigh in on; I would have to ask someone who did not already remember the punctuation rules before reading the book and see if their retention had improved.