Diana Page Jordan | Book Reviews and Inspiration

The Grammar Devotional: Daily Tips for Successful Writing from Grammar Girl

By Mignon Fogarty

Published October 27, 2009 (Paperback) Holt

More Info: Grammar Girl

It’s fun how a few quirky individuals can create cult followings out of stuff most of us can’t — or don’t want to — wrap our minds around.

Like grammar. Thank you, Grammar Girl. Even Oprah blurbed the book: “Mignon has come up with clever ideas to help even the most grammatically challenged person remember the rules.”

I was in the mood to learn something new – a continuation of a day of interviewing students, deans, profs at Carlson School of Management in Minneapolis.  Left brain. Right brain.  It’s all good stimulation.  I pulled Mignon Fogarty’s book The Grammar Devotional from my suitcase, and soon felt delighted giggles bubbling all through me.

This, despite juggling four mini-disc recorders — each limited in some capacity.  One deletes but is ancient. One records but won’t play audio into my laptop.  One won’t record, but dumps audio into my laptop. And the fourth records, but won’t let me label the audio tracks. All together, I have the ability to record three days of interviews and classroom activities, but with mini-discs gone the way of the dinosaurs, this is a dance I have to change.  I’ll want to discover new equipment that covers all the bases.  Come a long way from my big, clunky Marantz tape recorder. There’s a reason I say this.

It’s funny to me, that I didn’t get frustrated and frightened tonight.  I used to.  All the time.  Anything foreign would freak me out, and I’d flash into a fugue state that nothing and no one could penetrate.  Old fears re-triggered — suffice it to say there was a lot of violence in my house.  A lot: one of Fogarty’s grammar rules.  Two words.  Not one.

EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing – is healing me, and I am recovering the oddest qualities.  The ability to find my way around a new city, or even around a building.  The sudden enjoyment of watching sports on TV.  Figuring out confusing things that require equipment and instruction books.  And, playing with grammar rules.

A few weeks ago, I began dropping the comma between Hi and the person’s name, because I noticed no one else was using that comma.  And I thought I was wrong.   Nope. Not me.  Hi is an interjection, and deserves a comma.  Note to self: stick with what I know is correct.

Now that my memoir manuscript is done, and the first draft of my screenplay made my self-imposed June first deadline, I’ve been working on a novel.  One question that keeps coming up in Workshop — where I am blessed to share my work with nine other writers, most of them brilliant — is how to punctuate my character Lucy’s thoughts.

Fogarty says you can write the prose as is, with no special treatment.  Or, you can put quotes around “the words” that constitute Lucy’s thoughts.  Or — and this is my favorite – and, yay, I’m thrilled it’s accurate — put the thoughts in italics.

This is cool.

When you assume something, it’s based on nothing, just air.  When you presume it, it is based on facts.  Did you know that?

Fogarty has enough daily tips for a year.  One of my favorites is her salute to the cartoon show, The Simpsons, for being the Shakespeare of our time.  That is, for introducing a lot of new words into our language.  Like meh. So that’s where my son Justin got that expression.  Meaning lack of interest, by the way.  D’oh — after doing something quite dumb. And cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys.  That’s an insult to the French.

You might say Fogarty’s book is cromulent.

That is, acceptable.