Synopses & Reviews
Want your writing to sell, shock, or just sing? The acclaimed author of Wired Style presents a hip, real-world guide to the rules of grammar--and when to break them.
Today's writers need more spunk than Strunk. Whether crafted for the Great American Novel, Madison Avenue advertising, or Grammy Award-winning rap lyrics, memorable writing must jump off the page. Now, from copy veteran Constance Hale comes a fun, informative, indispensable guide to taking your writing from ordinary to extraordinary.
Sin and Syntax is more than just a style manual with examinations of sentence structure and parts of speech. In addition to spelling out the basic rules, Constance Hale teaches you when--and how--to effectively break them. Chock full of examples from traditional and nontraditional prose--from advertising jingles to song lyrics to literary classics--Sin and Syntax shows you why learning to "sin" will make you a better writer. Discover how to:
- Distinguish between words that are "pearls" and words that are "potatoes"
- Innovate with adjectives to avoid clichés
- Avoid "couch potato thinking" and "com-mitment phobia" when choosing verbs
- Use literary devices such as onomatopoeia, alliteration, and metaphor
PLUS--You'll learn:
- How Rich Little boosted his comedy career with the perfected use of one particular interjection
- Why Muhammad Ali's syntactically surprising speech worked as well as his jabs
- Which famous opening line from American literature contains no subject whatsoever
A perfect display of Hale's own literary principles, Sin and Syntax, with its clear, crisp, modern approach to style, will be an essential guide for all those who want to improve their command of the English language.
Synopsis
Sin and Syntax covers grammar's ground rules while revealing countless unconventional syntax secrets (such as when to use -- gasp! -- interjections or how to use slang and rhythm to your favor) that make for sinfully good writing. Featuring innovative variations on conventional sentence structure, Sin and Syntax is chock full of invigorating examples, Shakespearean soliloquies to Apple's "Think Different" campaign.
About the Author
Constance Hale (
[email protected]) is the author of
Wired Style, the one-of-a-kind guide to online English usage and geekspeak that was hailed by
Newsweek as "
The Chicago Manual of Style for the Millennium." A former editor at
Wired, Hale has written for numerous publications including the
San Francisco Examiner and
The Microsoft Network. She has created maverick writing courses for people of all ages, including a popular seminar called "Grammar for Grownups," and currently teaches at U.C. Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California.
Table of Contents
Words -- Nouns -- Pronouns -- Verbs -- Adjectives -- Adverbs -- Prepositions -- Conjunctions -- Interjections -- Sentences -- The subject, the predicate -- Simple sentences -- Phrases and clauses -- Sentence variety -- Music -- Voice -- Lyricism -- Melody -- Rhythm.