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The Glamour Of Grammar The Glamour Of Grammar: A Guide To The Magic And Mystery Of Practical English A Guide To The Magic And Mystery Of Practical English (2010)

by Roy Peter Clark(Favorite Author)

3.83 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0316089060 (ISBN13: 9780316089067)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Little Brown and Company

review 1: I enjoy reading books about language, grammar, punctuation…even diagramming sentences (loved “Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog”), so I was disappointed that I didn’t like this book more. I very much appreciate the author’s assertion that grammar isn’t, or shouldn’t be, all about fussy rules, and the 50 lessons he offers are (for the most part) clear and useful. But the writing was pretty uneven. I lost count of how many times he mentioned an interesting fact only to change directions unexpectedly without providing more background or explanation. There wasn’t much of a flow throughout this book; it reads like a random collection of observations and anecdotes that might have been written in bits and pieces over a long period of time. Interesting observations... more, just not terribly cohesive.I’m not sorry I read this book, but likely won’t re-read it again. The “Keepsakes” that helpfully summarize each lesson will serve to remind me of the critical points.
review 2: As with his "Writing Tools" book, Clark gives fifty suggestions on writing and reiterates what can be found in a high school English text. At the end of each chapter Clark summarizes. The reader can skip the text, read the summaries and do fine. The title of the book is overdone. It's about practical English. Glamour and magic and mystery oversell what Clark puts forward.Clark's chapters on tenses and connotation/denotation are good. The chapter on "To be" is disappointing. The author reminds us about our various "crotchets" such as getting stuck needlessly on not using a preposition at the end of a sentence, starting a sentence with "And" or "But", and avoiding split infinitives. With that in mind, it's interesting that Clark scratched his head over Armstrong's quote when the astronaut stepped on the moon. Clark insists that "an 'a' was missing." He adds it for him ("That's one small step for a man....") and thereby removes the music and wrecks the quote.Clark opens his chapter on sentence fragments by mentioning that his cholesterol numbers are "not good" and that this is "not a comforting image for a guy whose total cholesterol number is 70 points higher than his IQ." I scratched my own head on that one, first wondering about the relevance and then wondering about whether the author was engaging in display behavior about his high IQ. less

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