Verbicide, snappy sentences, opening lines, writing rituals, Bradbury's blessing, fast drafting, second-person pronouns, reupholstered proverbs, beautiful words, horrible words, and much more: a roundup of blog posts from Grammar & Composition in 2012.
December 2012
- Coordination: Practice in Building, Combining, and Revising Sentences (Part Two)
- Popular Grammar & Composition Posts in 2012
- Reading to Write: Old Essays for the New Year
- Kingsley Amis on "Merry Christmas"
- George Carlin on Finding Something to Write About
- Make a List, Ralphie
- Why Writers Write
- 100 Words and Phrases That Ticked You Off in 2012
- A Pop Quiz for Word Lovers
- Confusables: Family Resemblances and False Relations
- Zinsser's Brackets: How to Cut the Clutter
- R.L. Stevenson on Writing for the Ear
November 2012
- Online Dictionaries and Words of the Year: Language in the News
- Language Legos: Practice in Building, Combining, and Revising Sentences (Part One)
- How Benchley Beat Writer's Block
- Tuition-Free Composition Courses Online
- Berks and Wankers: The Lighter Side of Style Guides
- Lincoln's Words at Gettysburg
- Remembering English Teachers Who Changed Our Lives
- Quiz on Commonly Confused Words (Autumn 2012)
- Helen Keller on How to Become a Writer
- Are You a Gusher or a Trickler?
- Top 10 Tip Sheets
- Dummy "It," Existential "There," and a Slip of the Ear: There's a Name for It (#22)
- Taking Time to Read and Write
October 2012
- Frankenstorm, Google Ngrams, and Linguistic Universals: Language in the News
- Nominate Your Favorite Regionalism
- "The Unforgivable Syntax" by Christopher Morley
- On Walking and Writing
- Ten Classical Rhetorical Strategies You Can Use Today
- Good Opening Lines
- Advice From Roy Peter Clark on Becoming a Faster, Stronger Writer
- Grammatical Mission Impossible: Defining a Sentence
- A Good Grammar Game for a Good Cause
- Ten Questions and Answers About English Grammar
- Safire's Rules for Keeping a Diary
- New Exercises and Quizzes (Fall 2012)
- Slang and Sin in America
- Ten Student Essays We Never Finished Reading
September 2012
- Global English in the News
- Fast Drafting: Donald Murray's Six Tricks of the Trade
- A Few More Oddities: Illeism, Semantic Satiation, and Garden-Path Sentences
- Second-Person Pronouns: Lost and Found
- Barzun on the Pleasures of Revision
- Semantic Transparency, Moses Illusion, and Singular "They": There's a Name for It (#21)
- Quiz on Commonly Confused Words: Back-to-School Edition
- H.L. Mencken and the American Language
- The Long Decline of Political Oratory
- Still More Notes From the Lighter Side of Language
- For You, What's the Hardest Part of Writing?
- Reupholstered Proverbs: Why Two Heads Are Not Always Better Than One
August 2012
- Place Names, Peeving, and Bull: Language in the News
- Back to Skool Special: Artful Persuasion
- Week One of English 101: Tips, Topics, and Exercises
- A Few Grammatical Oddities: Group Genitives, Whimperatives, and Notional Agreement
- Say It!
- Return to Homophone Corner
- More Horrible Words
- At -ese: Academese, Legalese, and Other Species of Gobbledygook
- This Week's Word Is Psittacism
- Ten Quick Tips for Using Abbreviations
- The History of English in Ten Minutes
- Bogus Rules of Writing in the Silly Season
- Brevity
- Quiz on Commonly Confused Words: Summer Songs Edition
- Remembering Gore Vidal, American Essayist
July 2012
- Semicolons, Sporty Metaphors, and Semantic Illusions: Language in the News
- No Time Like the Present Tense
- Figurative Language Q & A: What's the Difference? (Part Three)
- What Is a Good Writer?
- The Streets of London: Ten Classic Essays
- Collins Dictionary Invites You to Submit New Words
- BS Alert: Ten Common Logical Fallacies
- N. B., etc.
- A Dozen New Grammar & Usage Exercises (Summer 2012)
- Online Resources for Writers (Summer 2012)
- Thurber on "Only"
- Recreational Linguistics: Words at Play
- Sluicing, Diazeugma, and Telicity: There's a Name for It (#20)
- Words Worth Borrowing (Part Two)
June 2012
- Grammar Bores, Endangered Languages, and Babbling Baby Robots: Language in the News
- What's Your Dialect?
- Words Worth Borrowing (Part One)
- Figurative Language Q & A: What's the Difference? (Part Two)
- Rules for Writers: Open for Discussion
- Descriptive Writing
- Sentence Combining in the 19th Century
- Quiz on Commonly Confused Words: Sci-Fi Edition
- Profiles in Prose
- Sitting Down to Write: Quirks, Rituals, and Routines
- Ray Bradbury's Blessing
- More Notes From the Lighter Side of Language
- How to Argue Like Socrates, Ben Franklin, and Lieutenant Columbo
- What Makes a Word a Word?
May 2012
- English as a Global Language: Boom and Backlash
- The Story Behind the Spellchecker Poem: "Candidate for a Pullet Surprise"
- Towel Day Special: Douglas Adams on Writing
- Figurative Language Q & A: What's the Difference?
- The Verb Is the Word
- The Writer's Best Friend
- The Most Beautiful Words
- Back to the Future: Edward Bellamy's Magic Reading Machine
- What Do You Get When One Ignoramus Meets Another Ignoramus?
- Bloviation, Bicapitalization, and Invariant Be: There's a Name for It (#19)
- Dunkin' Donuts Accused of Verbicide
- Writing Advice at About.com Homework and Study Tips
- Hard-Headed Advice for Aspiring Writers
April 2012
- Dynamic Verbs, Sentence Adverbs, and Gender-Neutral Pronouns: Language in the News
- A Brief Introduction to Classical Rhetoric
- Passages on Prose Style
- A Small Heap of Empty Phrases
- Three Meanings of Grammar
- The Serial Comma Controversy: Moe, Larry, and Curly or Moe, Larry and Curly?
- Quiz on Commonly Confused Words (Spring 2012)
- Harry Crews on Writing: "Try to Get Naked"
- Dipping Into David Crystal's Word-Hoard
- Steve Martin on the Period Shortage
- Ten More Uncommon Terms for Common Rhetorical Strategies
- Beware the Elongated Yellow Fruit
- Ten New Grammar Exercises (Spring 2012)
March 2012
- Bureaucratese, Bilingualism, and the Language of "Mad Men": Language in the News
- Seven Big Questions (and Answers) About English Grammar
- Memorable Lines From Classic Essays: A Matching Quiz
- Fragments, Crots, and Verbless Sentences
- Pros on Prose
- Notes From the Lighter Side of Language
- English Around the World: Irish-English Grammar
- Safire on Brevity: The Short and the Long of It
- Finding and Fashioning a Writer's Voice
- Missing Letters
- Creative Nonfiction: Jack London on the San Francisco Earthquake
- Word Words, Paraprosdokian, and Restaurantese: There's a Name for It (#18)
- A National Grammar Day Grammar Quiz
February 2012
- Lip-Reading, Mind-Reading, and DARE: Language in the News
- C.S. Lewis on What Really Matters in Writing
- How to Write an Ad
- Inside the Parentheses
- Grammatical Zeros
- Quick Tips for Writing Under Pressure
- Name That "-nym": A Matching Quiz
- Love Metaphors for Valentine's Day
- Having Fun With Language at Grammar & Composition
- Quiz on Commonly Confused Words (Winter 2012)
- Charles Dickens at 200: Tope’s Tenses, Pip’s Conjugations, and Mrs. Merdle’s Verbs
- Monosyllables: A Few Good Short Words
- A Crash Course in Linguistics
January 2012
- Happy Talk, Wordnik, and Multilingual Plagiarism: Language in the News
- Ten Quizzes
- How Winston Churchill Learned English
- Reflections on Words
- Writing Rituals: Whatever Gets You Through a Page
- Ten New Grammar Exercises (Winter 2012)
- Ten Things You May Not Have Known About Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" Speech
- Word Histories and Meanings
- Short Snappy Sentences
- Word Salad, Gongorism, and Consonant Clusters: There's a Name for It (#17)
- Language Mavens and Muphry's Law
- Recovering Hidden Verbs
- If You Want to Be a Writer . . .
