Woe is I

Along with reading fiction, I'm currently reading Woe is I: the grammarphobe's guide to better English in plain English, by Patricia T. O'Conner.

I'm not a fan of grammar books, or, indeed, the how-to-write books. I have them, but I do not consume them from cover-to-cover. I prefer to dip into the books to find what I need.

This one, though, is excellent.

We all know from school that the technical aspect of grammar is boring as hell. How many of us faded out as the teacher told us about verbs, nouns, pronouns, adverbs, adjectives, (yawning yet?), participles - dangling or otherwise, clauses, infinitives, split infinitives, possessives, cliches, onomatopeia and so on.

Woe is I takes grammar and shakes it up, makes it entertaining in an amusing way. Chapters like: Woe is I: therapy for pronoun anxiety, Comma Sutra: the joy of punctuation and The Living Dead: Let bygone rules be gone for example, give us the whys and wherefores written in entertaining prose.

This is not a dry dissertation on grammar, but a writer's best friend: fun, factual and useful with little poems. For example, the problem I have is when to use 'which' or 'that'. Ms O'Conner has a nifty poem:

Commas, which cut out the fat,
go with which, never with that.

Meaning, if you can take out the clause, use which, if not, use that.

The house, which had one an architectural award, sagged like an old man. You can take out the clause and it will still make sense: The house sagged like an old man.

The house that sagged like an old man won an architectural award. Take out the 'that' clause, and you change the emphasis and meaning of the sentence: The house won an architectural award.

So, now I know and can cut out the guess work and use the appropriate term. I could have found this elsewhere, and probably did. The difference is this book presented the solution in a manner I'm not likely to forget - and that makes it worthwhile.

I don't know if you can still get it. The book was published in 1996 by Riverhead Books, but look for it. I think you'll enjoy it. I did.