Sin and Syntax has been called a subversive grammar guide. But its purpose isn’t good grammar; it’s prose that makes us laugh, well up with tears, or just say “ahhhh.” Similarly, this Web site shares tips and resources, insights and inspiration—all in the interest of encouraging wicked good prose.

This blog brings you boneheaded errors and brilliant passages. It’s about showing how a deep sense of how English works saves us from comic errors, pompous pronouncements, and mere mediocrity. With that, let’s plunge into the peculiarities of prose….

When it comes to adjectives, editors love to quote Mark Twain, who is said to have told a young writer, “When you catch an adjective, kill it.” The language maven Ben Yagoda even used that quote as the title of a grammar book (which is quite good, BTW). Some writing coaches I know tell their clients to scrub the adjectives from their paragraphs.

But hang on! Adjectives make up an important class of words in our language (unlike, say, prepositions, which hardly inspire awe).

Feeling bad about my silence on this site (I’ve been on deep deadline for my next book), I wanted to give you share with you a site I came across in my research. It’s called the Pompous Ass Web site, and it aims to keep journalists if not honest, at least off the high horse.

“Your world can be reshaped, redefined by what other people have accomplished, what they have fantasized, what they have dreamed about and made a reality,” Dorothy Allison told a crowd of writers gathered recently in San Francisco. That was once the promise of traditional books; now it’s the promise of e-books.

I confess, I don’t yet have an iPad. I’m gonna buy one with the second installment of my advance. iPad or not, I try to stay on top of the fast-and-furious changes in the book biz. I’ve curated three new essays to help.

The highlight of a recent writers conference in San Francisco was a keynote by Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedwellers. The 62-year-old author is also a poet, an iconoclast, a mother of a “turkey-baster baby” and an inveterate watcher—with that baby, her now-18-year-old son Wolf—of American Idol. (Mind you, she only watches the first few weeks. She loses interest once the contestants get people to do their hair and makeup—“I want them in a raw, unfettered state,” she says, when they are “artists held in contempt.”)

Allison dug in and talked about what it means, really, to be part of the tribe of People Held in Contempt (i.e., penniless writers in a society that measures success in dollar signs). She also bucked up those of us freaked out by the tumult in publishing.

I recently had to spend a morning in traffic court (don’t ask), so I grabbed one of those books that has been on the shelf forever but never read. This one was The Art of Fact, an anthology edited in 1997 Ben Yagoda and Kevin Kerrane. In the Preface to The Art of Fact, Yagoda defines the mysterious genre of “literary journalism, which includes “fly on the wall” reporting, first-person tales, and lots of style.

I was recently contacted by a reporter with The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. She was writing about improving written communications and had come across a Yahoo blog post that offered tricks to business writers eager to craft wicked good memos.

I wanted to share our full email conversation, which probed whether email and texting are degrading the art of letters.

What was it about dinner last night (quiches, green salad, cheap wine) that made us think about PowerPoint? In San Francisco with friends, a conversation veers from politics to home renovation to copy editing to whether a Microsoft sensibility has invaded the nation’s newsmagazines. More and more stories seem to be conceived in bullet points. Raconteurs are turning into recounters.

Writing—no matter the length, no matter the venue—should always be a struggle. It takes time to synthesize a lot of information and find a narrative arc, and more time to let every sentence tell a small piece of a big story.

You see it in Strunk and White, you see in bibles on good writing, and you even see it in essays on this Web site: the command to use Anglo-Saxon words instead of Latin ones. In response I’ll use a very non-Anglo-Saxon word: hogwash!

Where did this meme start, and have the people who spread it really studied the history of English?

Let’s go back, way back, before the birth of Greenwich Mean Time….

I might be the only one so enthralled with grammar to be writing a new book that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about verbs but were afraid to ask. That research is taking me deep into the library stacks, as I review the history of English, bone up on linguistics, and track down little-known texts. It’s also taking me deep into the narratives of some of my favorite writers, who know exactly when and how to deploy those little words to make sentences pulse. Do you have a favorite piece of writing that uses verbs exquisitely? Want a little incentive to send it to me?

Ask any writer to define literary style, and you’ll find that the answer is as distinct as, well, that writer’s style. I noodled around on the Net and found that Gore Vidal defined style as “knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” Curious, I asked some of my favorite writers–including Po Bronson and Susan Orlean—to share their thoughts on style.

My third year of teaching at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism wound up last night, in a place called The Monday Club Bar in Harvard Square. We spent the last few weeks looking at the way different writers make their prose musical through the use of rhythm, and playing with the rhythm in our own paragraphs. I lectured these Nieman and Loeb fellows on parataxis and hypotaxis, even writing an essay on the search for rhythm to try to make some sense out of these somewhat obscure terms of lit crit.

I’m excited to announce that I just sold a proposal for a new book to W. W. Norton. This one will do for verbs what Sin and Syntax does for sentences. Here’s how I described it in the proposal:

Caesar got ‘em. Matthew got ‘em. Bellow got ‘em. Even E. B. Farnum and my dog got ‘em.

Got what?

Verbs.

Vital, vibrant, voluptuous, and, yes, sometimes vexing verbs.

I am! Well, maybe not afraid. Perhaps cowed.

I’ve just started reading To the Lighthouse for the first time in about 12 years. In previous reads, I’ve marveled at the giant leap Woolf takes into stream-of-consciousness writing. I love wallowing in Woolf’s metaphors and Mrs. Ramsey’s full-blown inner monologues.

Separately, this week I’ve been thinking about what I call “melody”—the use of sound in sentences, whether alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, or rhyme. I have suggested that writers sit near a window when it’s raining, or near the ocean, or near a fountain, and listen to the water, finding words that in some way echo the flow.

Then I read this passage in To the Lighthouse…

Some chewy bits and pieces to offer you this week. First, kudos to David Finkel, whose book The Good Soldiers was just named the recipient of the Anthony Lukas prize. I’ve long been an admirer of Finkel’s narrative journalism, which came to my attention when I edited the Nieman Foundation’s Narrative Digest. The Good Soldiers offers an interesting counterpoint to The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins.

How will books like these fare in the future, as traditional publishing adapts to new technology? Read about that and a list of tips from a writer/editor pal of mine in California.

Do you recognize those words—the last line of a poem? They were cited recently by a poet who came to speak to a gathering of reporters…

The poet registered, physically, with a jolt. His face was purplish red, as were his hands, where large bruises bloom. His thinning gray hair, grown four or five inches, scythed in every direction: an exuberant J on the right side of his head, a backward J on the left, preposterous spikes on top.

His pronouncements were as fierce and unruly as his hair.

I’m celebrating spring (which has arrived ahead of schedule, with balmy temperatures and birds chirping) by taking another literature class at Harvard with my favorite book critic.

I recently cracked a very famous novel and was confounded by its first sentence. (“Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”) I ask you, why did the writer launch his novel this way? Answer this and two other questions, and you might win a free, signed copy of Sin and Syntax.

Last Friday I hosted a gathering of two editors, four agents, and about 30 midcareer writers at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. The session set out to demystify book publishing and was intended to help journalists understand what role books might play in our careers.

The speakers came from small and large agencies, and small and large publishers, in Boston and New York. Here’s a random sampling of ideas that surfaced…

“Do you believe in writer’s block?” asked a journalist friend recently at dinner. Her tone made me think she was one of the lucky ones—writers who never hesitate, never doubt themselves, never contemplate scrapping it all and going to law school.

I soon learned that she is no more immune than the rest of us from the ins and outs of starting and stopping, trying and failing, hoping and despairing. She was just curious about my opinion.

Of course I offered it.

In my last post, I wrote about seeing a performance of Mozart Dances by the Mark Morris Dance Group. A few days before that performance at the Boston Opera, I listened in on a conversation between Morris and Richard Dyer, a former music critic, which took place at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre. I reported on that conversation with a group of Tweeting journalists #markmorris.

My ears perked up when a dance teacher asked the choreographer whether he ever feared being blocked, and what he did when he “dried up.” Morris described being creatively blocked as a kind of occupational hazard and offered some useful advice to any writer who suffers from occasional writer’s block.

Let me tell you about something I saw last night. Eighteen men and women, all lightly dressed in summer white, lay on a proscenium stage. From the floor, 36 naked hands bent at right angles from 36 wrists and wriggled up, each at a slightly different pace. Let me make sure you’ve got the picture: 36 splayed palms with urgently curled fingertips, turning clockwise and counterclockwise, clockwise and counterclockwise—as if working the lids of enormous and invisible upside-down jars—and at the same time lifting slowly, pushed upwards by long, lithe, tendril-like arms.

What did any of this have to do with writing?

Sitting in the cab of a pickup, waiting to drive up the coast of O‘ahu, I find myself watching a butterfly four feet in front of the windshield. My focus sharpens. The butterfly’s wings are like the iced feuilles of a French pastry—terribly thin slices of tangerine, edged in mocha. They raise and lower, raise and lower, forming two erect parallel planes, then two flat spans. The insect swoops and twitches…. I have been looking at this amazing bush of purple, green, and orange every day for a week. But I haven’t seen it.

If the tropics pry open the senses, they humble the writer. It’s one thing to discover the powers of perception, quite another to find powers of description. It can take days for my muscles to let go, longer for my senses to open, and even longer to connect words to images.

Didja catch two fascinating articles in last Sunday’s New York Times? In the Op-Ed pages, Farrar, Straus & Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi writes about the heroic—and hidden—work behind great literature, and about the myopia of those infatuated with the idea of e-books.

David Carr, in “Why Twitter Will Endure,” confesses his own infatuation with Twitter.

In Talking Story, Shelly Runyon writes about the Twitter feed of Susan Orlean, and what it tells us about Orlean’s particular brand of short-burst communication.

I just read this article in the San Francisco Chronicle and had myself a snigger.

Tom Torriglia happily proclaims himself part of the grammar police, and he even started a group called NAGG (the National Association of Good Grammar).

But already I don’t trust him.

I spent the plane ride home to California correcting grammar exams. What fun! Seriously. This fall an intrepid group of Harvard expository-writing students followed me for 14 weeks on a romp through the nouns & verbs, simple sentences, and—eek!—relative clauses. We wrapped up by sorting through the sentences of Lewis Carroll. (Alice in Wonderland is great for prepositional phrases—all those ins, outs, downs, and throughs.) We also contemplated the comma, the semicolon, and other sundry pieces of punctuation.

I can’t end the year without a little contest for you, my readers. Wanna win a New Year’s present from me?

An intriguing collection of unlike things ends up on the New York Times list of 100 notable books each year. A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review about the blurring of fiction and nonfiction claims that nonfiction is losing its “frisson.” I hardly agree—see my essay in Talking Story—but if you need further convincing, go no further than the NYT’s top 100.

Here is the Connie Cull…

I’ll bet you’ve had your fill this week of the former beauty queen, former mayor of Wasilla, former governor of Alaska, former vice-presidential candidate. I know I have. So while the pundits talk on and on about Sarah Palin, I space out and listen to their grammar.

I have to admit, I was surprised to hear Gwen Ifill and Bob Woodward, on ABC’s This Week, screw up their pronouns when discussing Going Rogue. It was the pronouns “going rogue” in their exchange.

The other day I was trying to impress upon a class of writers how cool it is that every sentence in English can be boiled down to one of four sentence patterns. They were having trouble grasping the second pattern, whose main elements are a subject, a transitive verb, and a direct object. That object thing was giving them heartburn.

I remembered a game—The Exquisite Corpse—the Surrealists used to play. In a twist of the parlor game Consequences—and its visual analogue, Picture Consequences—they would string random words together in a certain pattern. The resulting sentence sometimes flirted with rationality, but worked structurally.

I mentioned earlier that I’m auditing an English class at Harvard taught by literary critic James Wood. We’ve so far muscled our way through Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, V. S. Naipaul, and Henry Green. Now we are reading Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. It’s an inspiring read in all sorts of ways, but one thing I noticed right away was the Irish-Turk-sort-of-American writer’s use of metaphors.

Take this description, right at the beginning of the book, written in the voice of the Dutch narrator: “It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows case by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe, yearn even for those days when you play cricket wearing two sweaters under a cold sky patched here and there by a blue tatter—enough to make a sailor’s pants, as my mother used to say.”

The sky is one of the hardest things to describe in a fresh way.

Barak Obama may be a damn good rhetoritician, but his politically correct use of pronouns is bugging me. Take this, from the July 22 press conference when he waded into the Henry Louis Gates-Sgt. Crowley brouhaha: “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.”

While pundits jumped on the President’s case for saying the Cambridge police acted “stupidly,” I muttered under my breath about his use of “they” when “he” or “she” was called for.

In case you haven’t noticed, each week I post a some writing and grammar exercises–an easy, self-guided writing class. Check out For Writers and Teachers, under Resources. I have a growing email list of teachers who receive once-a-week notes on using Sin and Syntax in the classroom. Please feel free to join us.

I tend to use this blog for thoughts on writing, but I’m feeling a pent-up desire to go grammatical. Next post: One of my biggest pet peeves and how I wish our Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning president didn’t mash his pronouns.

I’m fascinated with writing that uses the techniques of fiction to enliven nonfiction, whether in print, online, or on the radio or in documentary films.

Ken Burns is hard to ignore—not just because his The National Parks: America’s Best Idea preempted PBS prime-time programming last week—but also because he has the chops and the resources to do great narrative journalism. I mainly agreed with Mary McNamara’s LA Times review, but while watching endless footage of razorlike mountains and verdant plains, I couldn’t help muttering, “Does it have to be so long?” “Could the writing have more frisson?” “Can Ken Burns do tone that isn’t elegiac?”

I’ve always had a soft spot for William Safire. Of course, I’m too young to hold against him his swordsmanship as Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, especially since the phrases that survived—“nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history”—seem more laughable than irksome. (Any wordsmith knows that alliteration should never be carried that far.) Even his nastier jabs—calling Hillary Clinton “a congenital liar”—lost their sting in the repartee that followed (a Clinton aide said that the chief of state, “if he were not president,” would have busted Safire’s nose; Safire parried by praising the use of the subjunctive.)

If you think I’m obsessed with point of view, you’re right! I am auditing a Harvard class taught by James Wood (also a critic for The New Yorker), who has been discussing point of view in novels by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov. And in the first lecture of the class, Postwar American and British Fiction, Woods suggested that we might “want to pick up some Flaubert” and look specifically at point of view. OK, so I devoured all 275 pages of Madame Bovary.

As far as playing with point of view, and not in blogs but in the pages of The New York Times and Rolling Stone, two of my favorite political journalists combine novel points of view with strong attitude and voice. They would be Mark Leibovich and Matt Taibbi.

I’ve been thinking about point of view. After all, what defines a blog if not point of view? A blog brings you one person’s prejudices, insights, and endless opinions. (Of course, the best blogs bring you much more—like new information, credible reporting, and, sometimes, bursts of brilliant writing.)

But a blog often comes alive because of another aspect of point of view, the literary aspect. The writer sets this point of view by his or her choice of pronouns—I, we, you, he, one, they. I’ve pondered what point of view to use here: The soul-bearing I? The inclusive we, which can also verge into the elegant “editorial we” or the arrogant “royal we”? Or the informal you, capable of sliding from authoritative, even bossy, to irreverent and hip?