Yesterday, March 4th (“March forth!”), was National Grammar Day. Now, I’m really not one to celebrate holidays, but the blocks insisted. And how can I say no to blocks? Or grammar?
I don’t know if I’ll celebrate next year, though—it’s getting too commercial. They’ve forgotten it’s supposed to be about the grammar.
There was no comic last week because of the holidays, but I have a really fun writing game to tell you about! Don’t worry if you have no literary knowledge—you just have to enjoy writing (usually cheesy) sentences. I played it with my sister, her boyfriend, my cousin, and my uncle. My uncle found out about this game from a New York Times article called What’s Scrabble When You Can Play Novelist?. You can either use cheap paperback books or, in the new digital age, you can use Amazon.com. You need around 4-8 people and some sheets of paper (they should all match). Here’s how it works:
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I still have my copy of The Elements of Style from high school, and it’s probably the first book that made me excited about grammar. Their disdain for long-winded phrases and useless words delighted me. It’s a bold book. It’s concise. It was a breath of fresh air in a stuffy English-classroom. But how good is it? Is it outdated? Is it just plain wrong?
Geoffrey K. Pullum, the head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh, isn’t a fan. In his article, 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice, he tears the book apart, along with its authors:
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