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Everyone needs to know how to write stylish prose – students, professionals, and seasoned writers alike. Whether you’re writing to sell, shock, or just sing, Sin and Syntax – now celebrating 20 years in print–is the guide you need to improve your command of the English language.
Ten of the Best Books on Writing | Reading Room | Faber Academy
As for the area where our Usage Panel was conservative, we upheld most of the classic distinctions in grammar—“can” and “may,” “fewer” and “less,” “eldest” and “oldest,” etc.—and decried the classic errors, insisting that “flout” still doesn’t mean “flaunt,” no matter how many writers flaunt their ignorance by flouting the rule, and that “fortuitou
... See moreWilliam Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction
“Properly speaking, of course, we cannot call it chaos. Grammar is like the air: someone higher up might try to set rules for using it, but people won’t necessarily follow them.”
Jay Rubin • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel (Vintage International)
Two other dictionary projects: The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) by Ambrose Pierce and The Devil’s Financial Dictionary (2016) by Jason Zweig. I’m more interested in the original; all the definitions are satirical and he wrote it over decades. It has around 1,600 words in the unabridged version.
∆ Hart Crane, from a letter quoted in Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet by Philip Horton (Norton, 1937)
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I am always impressed by a well-written menu, one that is informative and appetizing without slipping into pretentious nonsense. Here, for example, is a London restaurant’s attempt to justify the exorbitant price of its whitebait: “The tiny fresh fish are tossed by our chef for a few fleeting seconds into a bath of boiling oil, and then removed bef
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