- HOME
- INTRO TO THE FORUM
- USE AND MISUSE
- BADLY WRITTEN, BADLY SPOKEN
- GETTING
TO KNOW ENGLISH - PREPARING FOR ENGLISH PROFICIENCY TESTS
- GOING DEEPER INTO ENGLISH
- YOU ASKED ME THIS QUESTION
- EDUCATION AND TEACHING FORUM
- ADVICE AND DISSENT
- MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH
- STUDENTS' SOUNDING BOARD
- LANGUAGE HUMOR AT ITS FINEST
- THE LOUNGE
- NOTABLE WORKS BY OUR VERY OWN
- ESSAYS BY JOSE CARILLO
- A Unified Approach To The Proper Use Of Punctuation In English - II
- A Unified Approach To The Proper Use Of Punctuation In English - III
- Steeling Ourselves Against Common Subject-Verb Disagreement Pitfalls
- The Appropriate Way To Position Subordinate Clauses And Phrases
- Please Don’t Wish Me ‘More Power!’
- Let’s Say Goodbye To Those Irritating English Clichés
- ABOUT JOSE CARILLO
- READINGS ABOUT LANGUAGE
- TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
- NEWS AND COMMENTARY
- BOOKSHOP
- ARCHIVES
READINGS IN LANGUAGE
This new section features links to interesting, instructive, or thought-provoking readings about the English language. The selections could be anywhere from light and humorous to serious and scholarly, and they range widely from the reading, writing, listening, and speaking disciplines to the teaching and learning of English.
Language maven holds court over crimes against English
Whether you are already an established writer or one still grappling with the niceties of written exposition, you’ll get a lot of valuable insights about the English language by reading Barbara Wallraff’s Word Court: Wherein Verbal Virtue Is Rewarded, Crimes Against the Language Are Punished, and Poetic Justice Is Done (Mariner Books, 384 pages). The book, which became a best-seller when it was published in 2001, consists largely of material from Wallraff’s hugely popular “Word Court” column for The Atlantic Monthly, where she encourages readers how to have informed opinions of their own about words and language. In a delightful, chatty way, she shows to prospective wordsmiths the ins and outs of acquiring a good, readable style all their own.
Wallraff, who is also a senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly and a syndicated columnist of King Features, shares in Word Court her insights about changes in the English language, questions about grammar, and issues concerning specific words and phrases. She draws from her vast experience as a language commentator and editor of The Atlantic Monthly since 1983, an experience that has made her one of America’s most widely read and beloved writers on language. “What I know about language derives chiefly from my having edited, line by line and word by word, other people’s writing over the past two decades,” she says.
Read “A Chat with Barbara Wallraff” in Wordsmith.org now!
Read “A Conversation With Barbara Wallraff” in WritersWrite.com now!
RELATED READING:
In “A loathed phrase turns 50,” Boston Globe language columnist Jan Freeman writes in the paper’s October 24, 2010 issue about her sentiments regarding the widely disputed phrase “I couldn’t care less,” which first showed up in print on October 20, 1960 in a letter asking advice-columnist Ann Landers to settle a dispute about its usage. “She couldn’t have known it at the time, but her reader’s trivial question would be wasting newspaper space (and bandwidth, too) for decades, as it blossomed into one of the great language peeves of our time,” Freeman says in her column.
Read Jan Freeman’s “A loathed phrase turns 50” in the Boston Globe now!
Click to read comments or post a comment
View the complete list of postings in this section
(requires registration to post)
