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Summary: Grammar Fun
Review: It's refreshing to see a style guide that doesn't take itself so seriously! Bill Walsh gives witty, clever, and most importantly, CLEAR guidance on how to communicate effectively. This is a great resource for the grammar aficionado.
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Summary: This Curmudgeon Needs Help from Tougher Curmudgeon
Review: Mr. Walsh announces breezily that he "couldn't diagram a sentence if my life depended on it." We can tell he can't from the excerpt. He is ignorant and proud of being so; moreover, he wants to proselytize his ignorance under the false promise of making grammar easy. This excerpt shows that Mr. Walsh suffers from lazy reliance on the pronouns "it" and "that" sans antecedents. Such writers don't respect their readers enough to make their meaning clear by providing an antecedent or the missing noun. He inserts commas where they shouldn't be. He omits them where they should be. He splits a compound predicate adjective in the first paragraph with a superfluous comma("...consistently, [sic] and harder..."); he omits a needed comma in the compound sentence in the second paragraph (...superstitions [sic] and you...). This fellow is one of the tribe of gonzo grammarians who have dummied down grammar books in recent years to scam people into thinking that grammar can be easy to if some fly-by-night ersatz grammarian merely concocts new maxims, sneers at venerable rules, and makes a buck in the process. One wishes that the exuberant Mr. Walsh had spared us yet another of these blithe grammar-made-easy pamphlets of shallow scholarship and outright errors.
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Summary: Lapsing into Too Much Personality
Review: This book is worth the 15 bucks if only for the section on quotes--it really shows how to properly construct them. Many other grammar books discuss the things we find in this book, but this author often goes a step further in his explanations. He writes, 'Semi-colons are ugly.' This is good because now we've heard something no other grammarian thought to tell us. It should be pointed out, though, that for the beginning writer there are other more practical grammar books. 'Woe is I' is one; 'English Grammar for Dummies' is another. Still, this book is a must-have for the serious writer.The book is also annoying for several reasons. This notion that funny makes things more learnable has gotten way out of control. I want to go back to this book time and again but cringe at reading the same joke over and over. I also find the author's relentless name-dropping distracting. How can I concentrate when he's always going on about Nicole and OJ, Muhammad Ali, Newt Gringrich, et al? Then there's the subtle humor he's wont to use to make a point that's often too subtle--you need an extra second or too to deduce the gag. In sum, the author obviously has a lot to share with us but overdoes the personality thing. When I want hip, subtle, and scads of personality I'll watch 'Friends,' I don't want to see all this in my grammar books. Nat
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Summary: An engaging read with compelling style rationale
Review: This engaging little book is as much a satisfying read as it is a handy reference. Yes, the book comprises Bill Walsh's positions on grammar, punctuation, and usage. Any curmudgeonly editor has positions. But Walsh offers compelling, practical arguments for his positions. Anyone whose work I've edited will readily attest to my own personal curmudgeonly positions. In an afternoon of reading Walsh's book, and to the probable shock of several of the authors with whom I've worked, I have changed several of mine, such as: - (p. 84) I have ceased to use the en dash to separate numeral ranges. - (p. 128) I have ceased to automatically replace all instances of "different than" with "different from." I now first consider whether the comparison is indirect; if so, "than" stays. I also learned the error of my ways in a few areas I'm too embarrassed to mention. Walsh's book collects content he used to keep on his Web site. His site continues to feature the book's "sharp points," so if you'd like to try before you buy, check out website
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Summary: Style with Humor
Review: This may go beyond what the typical office worker needs to know about style as it is heavily weighted toward newspaper writing. The author is a copy editing guy, (ok, THE copy editing guy) at the Washington Post. But there is plenty of information on common usage as well. Sometimes the errors we make (or we all have other people TELL us we are making) are just a matter of personal preference. Bill Walsh has his own strong preferences but also allows that other usages are not necessarily incorrect. (He is often at odds with the AP stylebook.) I like his approach and find that he provides excellent comparisons and reasoning for what we read and hear every day. Useful and funny too.
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Summary: Moderately informative, modestly funny
Review: Walsh makes many fine points about style in writing, particularly writing for a newspaper. But his smartypants humor wears thin very quickly. He seems to think he's really cute - wink, wink, nudge, nudge - when, to this reader, he's simply tiresome. In his subtitle he calls himself a "curmudgeon," but I suspect he really is a frustrated stand-up comedian. I don't know who his audience is. Surely this book is not to be used for reference: imagine having to read the same jokes over and over. And it's also not for the 'grammar for dummies' crowd: it's generally too sophisticated for them. If I were his editor I'd suggest a rewrite.
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Summary: Lapsing Into a Comma : A Curmudgeon's Guide to the Many Thin
Review: Whether you're editing your own writing or someone else's, you will find Lapsing Into a Comma an invaluable and entertaining resource. Part commentary, part stylebook, it addresses not only the usual usage topics (split infinitives, that vs. which and a historic vs. an historic) but also some issues too new or obscure to be found in the traditional manuals (e-mail vs. email, how to tell a playmate from a Playboy Bunny and why a right hook is a bad example of a punch). In an opinionated, humorous and, yes, curmudgeonly way, Bill Walsh of the Washington Post strikes an often unpredictable balance between the traditional and the progressive in examining the state of American English usage in the computer age
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