Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

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.

Constance Hale (chale@well.com) 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.