Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose - Hardcover

Hale, Constance

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767903080 ISBN 13: 9780767903080

Publisher: Broadway, 1999

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

You gotta love a grammar guide that calls verbs "moody little suckers" and adverbs "promiscuous." Constance Hale (Wired Style) relishes prose that is deliberate, beautiful, and bold. Go ahead and break the rules, she says; just know the rules first, and know why you are breaking them. In Sin & Syntax, Hale examines the elements of grammar from four angles: the "bones" (the grammar lesson), the "flesh" (the writing lesson), "cardinal sins" (what she calls "true transgressions"), and "carnal pleasures" (the beauty that results from either "hew[ing] exquisitely to the underlying codes of language," or not).

For illustration, Hale hails Walt Whitman and Roger Angell, and rails upon Alexander Haig and the Gump's catalogue. She hauls in Joan Didion to make a case for writing in the first person, Mark Twain to promote the killing of adjectives, C.S. Lewis to advocate showing rather than telling, and Loudon Wainwright III to lament the abuse of the word like. But Hale has no problem making her own points. "Euphemisms," she says, "are for wimps." She dismisses a particularly heinous example of scholarly prose as "a bunch of big words thrown into an Osterizer." Even other grammarians don't escape her derision: "Get a grip," Hale says. "Hopefully as a sentence adverb is here to stay." But what distinguishes Sin and Syntax most is its enthusiasm for prose that takes risks. "Even if you have to check with a lawyer," says Hale, "isn't a kick-ass piece of writing worth the effort?" --Jane Steinberg

From the Back Cover

"Move over, grumpy schoolmarms everywhere. Your time has come. For the writer or wannabe, Sin and Syntax is an urgently needed, updated, and hip guide to modern language and writing. Nobody but Connie Hale could make the elements of 21st-century style so much fun."
--Jon Katz, media critic and author of Running to the Mountain and Virtuous Reality

"Sin and Syntax is one of the rare books that recognizes--and even celebrates--the fact that good writing has little to do with 'rules' and much to do with a true understanding of effective prose. Connie Hale provides us an invaluable service by showing us what works and what doesn't in the real world, regardless of what the pedants say."
--Jesse Sheidlower, Senior Editor, Random House Dictionaries, and author of "Jesse's Word of the Day" column

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0767903080
• ISBN 13: 9780767903080
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304