NEWS
By John E. McIntyre and The Baltimore Sun | May 14, 2013
Being a teacher's pet as a child endeared me to no one but teachers. My third-grade teacher, Marian Gulley, once let me take a fourth-graders' history test. (At Elizaville Elementary School, the third and fourth grades were in a single classroom; the teacher instructed one class while the other studied, then reversed.) I scored a 96, from having listened to the fourth-grade class and read their history textbook for amusement. It was the highest grade on the test. I was proud, but my mother observed sagely, "I bet that didn't make you many friends in the fourth grade.
NEWS
By John E. McIntyre and The Baltimore Sun | May 11, 2013
As a journalist, I gravitate toward the lurid. That's just how we roll. If some post-adolescent crank tries to set up a "white student union" at Towson University, he is guaranteed ink. If some crackpot explains that George W. Bush was behind the September 11 attacks, he will get air time somewhere. If Orly Taitz does to court to claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, she will get attention from the press as well as from irritated judges. The loonier they are, the more easily we reassure ourselves that we are sane.
NEWS
By John E. McIntyre and The Baltimore Sun | March 20, 2013
If you are a native speaker of English, you have English grammar in your head, and it has been there since you were a very small child. Unfortunately, the process of translating that grammar into terms for discussion of writing has not gone well. Traditional schoolroom grammar borrowed terms from Latin that were not always a good fit with English, and it codified English grammar into a rigid set of rules (some of them bogus) that oversimplified the language for pedagogical purposes.
NEWS
By John E. McIntyre and The Baltimore Sun | March 13, 2013
Much as I am in sympathy with Lucy Ferriss's latest post at Lingua Franca , I fear that something she says may be subject to a dangerous misinterpretation: As I've said before, people want rules. Students, for instance, take notice when they start reading “to the Senator and I” in the newspaper, and when “with she and her brother” receives tacit approval from writing instructors. They may even notice that “I like he and she” has started sounding OK. A little time passes, and they begin to doubt whether me , him , us , and them ever were correct to say in a predicate construction or prepositional phrase.
NEWS
By John E. McIntyre and The Baltimore Sun | March 3, 2013
On the eve of National Grammar Day, I come before you with a caution: grammar isn't everything. Oh, probably you knew that at some level. You understood that it is possible for a text to be spanking clean as far as spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, and yes, even AP style if you swing that way, and still be defective. Factually inaccurate. Dishonest. Unclear. Given to mixed or inapt metaphors, Pretentious. You know, if you are an editor, that your scrupulous attention to spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, and house style is, if the larger questions are allowed to go unaddressed, essentially an exercise in what is inelegantly called turd polishing.
NEWS
By John E. McIntyre and The Baltimore Sun | February 28, 2013
Monday, March 4, is National Grammar Day. Are you ready? Grammar Girl, the estimable Mignon Fogarty, has set up a National Grammar Day page with links to various events and activities. At Poynter.org, the magisterial Roy Peter Clark will be conducting a webinar, This Ain't Your Grandma's Grammar . On Twitter, @EditorMark, the indefatigable Mark Allen, is conducting another National Grammar Day haiku contest ...