Grammar Book Recommendations

Recognizing of course that those qualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

some suggestions here: http://www.englishforums.com/English/TheBestGrammarBookEver/hknj/post.htm

browsing Amazon leads me to wonder if there isn't such a book as i'm looking for? usage guides are not quite what i'm after, though i will probably buy a fowler's 3rd. i'm hoping to find a book that functions like a cool, smart English teacher who is unable to contain her excitement about diagramming sentences.

david foster wallace, get your smart ass on this

Pinckert's Practical Grammar - Robert C. Pinckert
The Careful Writer - Theodore M. Bernstein
The Grammar Bible: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Grammar but Didn't Know Whom to Ask - Michael Strumpf & Auriel Douglas
Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose - Constance Hale
The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed - Karen Elizabeth Gordon

First three are readable guides, last two clearly aim to entertain the casual reader.

Wait is it Fowler 3 that you're supposed to get? I thought it was Fowler 2. Let me go look...

Am I the only person who thought the Transitive Vampire book was kinda dull? Especially compared to, say, Fowler. I mean but I am not the audience.

No, I hated DTV. Cutey-pie bullshit. I only mentioned it 'cuz it's the kind of thing mentioned in W i ll's 4th post.

And, in its defense, some folks I know dug it.

thanks for the titles!

i'm sure it's fowler 2 you're "supposed" to get. i'm not sure i care.

Fowlers Modern English Usage 2ND Edition by H W Fowler (Hardcover - Jan 1, 1965)
6 Used & new from $65.00

The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (New Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd Ed) by H. W. Fowler and R. W. Burchfield (Hardcover - April 13, 2000)
11 Used & new from $14.99

No, this is important! Burchfield is no Fowler, and apparently he sucked a lot of the fun out of it! Also, that price is absurd, I run across cheap copies of Fowler 2 all the time. Powells has it for $7.50, for instance.

hmm, ok. thanks for pointing this out.

this title

The Grammar Bible: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Grammar but Didn't Know Whom to Ask - Michael Strumpf & Auriel Douglas

makes me want to gouge at my eyes

david foster wallace, get your smart ass on this

This is the book that his usage piece is about. It's the usage book I most frequently consult, but that may be because the only Fowler's I have is the dreaded third edition.

Also, I mean, I should point out that Fowler's is fun, rather than a useful usage book. Or at least, not useful in how I think that term is being used here.

Not exactly grammar, but Im trying to improve my report writing for work. My critical skills are ok, but I cant write to save myself. Is Sir Ernest Gowers "The Complete Plain Words" (3rd Ed) a good place to start?

the thread I've been looking for all my life

http://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-American-Usage-Garner/dp/0195382757/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

hmm i might need that, or just want it. wondering what about grammar is troubling dyao

verb tenses makin me verbally tense

^^aspiring to be an undie wrapper

it's okay I'm giving in to the sublingual primacy of the monks atm so I'm cool

this DFW essay is kind of sloppy

not really buying descriptive linguistics = scientific method applied to language

What do you mean?

Jespersen's books are all really interesting and helped me understand grammar and language a lot better. There are a handful which cover a lot of the same ground, and one in particular which is basically a rewritten version of previous work. Did you know that he did the transformational generative grammar thing in the thirties? Except he called it Analytic Syntax, and I'm guessing (I don't know) his method didn't catch on. Maybe down the linguistic pipeline it got knocked about until it was something else, something Chomskeyan.

My fave grammar, spiritually related to Jespersen, is Margaret Bryant's Functional English Grammar.

what's not to buy?
i like greenbaum & quirk 'a student's grammar of the english language' for english syntax/grammar
http://www.al3ez.net/upload/d/sahm2007_519OPBHmBGL.jpg

as a fellow ESL teacher, i have to ask what sort of background/training you have, dyao -- MA in Applied Linguistics/TESOL?

most of the books mentioned above are by native speakers and for native speakers -- you need something that is tailored for TESOL specifically, i imagine? otherwise you are sort of wasting your time.

that said, this is another option that may be more useful to you than stuff like the transitive vampire or "eats, shoots, and leaves"
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0838447252.jpg

God, Transitive Vampire, Eats, Shoots & Leaves - both annoying. I hate that prescriptive cant.

yeah that shit is stupid and it's just the kind of thing that makes fussy people feel good about themselves. there's an element of prescriptivism to teaching any language, but i think it's important to point out that, for instance, the following two sentences mean the same thing:

The hat that I bought doesn't fit.
The hat I bought doesn't fit.

totally^^^^

Sometimes it's so fussy people feel good about themselves, and then there are some people who are just on the path to something else, like the college guy clerking at the supermarket who says, "I'm well." I know that guy's an okay guy. But the librarian who says "It is he" I want to spit in the face of.

those people also overcorrect all the time, leading to shit like "The man gave a present to my sister and I." overcorrection is an interesting phenomenon sociolinguistically, but it drives me nuts when people use their "proper" grammar to lord their superiority over people, esp. if they're [prescriptively] wrong!

i just taught pronoun case a few weeks ago and it was amazing how easy it was for people to understand once i told them "get rid of your sister -- what do you have?" and they got it. no prob bob.

I think it's related to that phenomenon where the spelling of a word changes the pronunciation, like with "comptroller" and "waistcoat." They're both byproducts of literacy, and maybe somewhere along the line it might turn what's wrong into something right?

maybe, but pronunciation/orthography changing and subject/object pronouns changing are not going to happen at the same rate. for instance, i think that someday -- someday -- this sentence will be considered fully totally acceptable:

"Everyone should take their clothes off immediately."

but for now, everyone is a singular indefinite pronoun and possessive pronouns need to agree with their antecedents. pronunciation can change more quickly/easily because it's not as rooted in functional usage. that is, its essential word form is not changing drastically. pronunciation/orthography are another can of worms sociolinguistically, i think.

i'm not sure i know what you're talking about re: waistcoat though?

I think it went from waistcoat to westcət to waistcoat?

For Standard English, that sentence is incorrect. For English generally, I think that sentence is definitely correct, and that a lot of such disagreements in number are invisible to most English hearers, such as disagreements using "none" - either saying "none are" or saying "none" when you should say "neither" - and therefore, to me, correct. It only sounds wrong to grammar people, and even then I'd say not all of them. McWhorter wrote an interesting essay in defense of "their."

I think you're right about the rate of change, though.

FWIW I'm not zinging descriptive linguistics - I just took issue with DFW's characterization of its approach in his essay about english usage, where he basically strawmans descriptive linguistics using a ridiculous reductio ad absurdum argument - I consider myself much more of a descriptivist than a prescriptivist!

as a fellow ESL teacher, i have to ask what sort of background/training you have, dyao -- MA in Applied Linguistics/TESOL?

― figgy pudding (La Lechera), Thursday, March 11, 2010 5:24 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

here's where I fess up and admit that I don't have any ;_; I've been trying to teach myself TESL/pedagogy in general but it's hard to find good resources

thanks very much for the recommendations though!! I will check them out ASAP - do you have any other recommendations?

pm me if you want to talk about this. my webmail address works. would love to talk about it! i need more info about the kinds of classes you're teaching and what your goals are.

replied - thanks so much