Quotes About Grammar

German wasn't good for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn't interrupt.

He had never really mastered English, but he'd studied enough to have a healthy fear of its random severity, the senseless brutality of its conjugations; it was unpredictable, like a cross-bred dog.

A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.

God is not all that interested in your grammar. He is interested in the meaning of your grammar!

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: You find the present tense and the past perfect.

As the author of a work, I don't relinquish author-ity to just any critic, particularly not to people whose work I've not read or don't respect; those biased by envy are the least relevant, and grounded grammarians who strangle or sterilize under a banner of superiority are a close second.

Teaching English and teaching Writing are two separate things.

Everything bows to success, even grammar.

Cordelia glared at me. 'I expect if someone strapped you to table an swung an axe over your naked quivering flesh like The Pit and the Pendulum, you'd be correcting his grammar'.

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

Mathematics is human reason itself in a form everyone can recognise. Why should poetry, reason and religion not be higher forms of Mathematics? All that is needed is a grammar of their common language.

The human mind hungers for reality; except for the largely encapsulated id, which is the depository of the raw drives and of deeply repressed material, the other institutions of the mind, the ego and the superego, draw continuously and liberally on the culture in which they subsist, develop, succeed, and fail. While the mind presents the world with its needs, the world gives the mind its grammar, wishes their vocabulary, anxieties their object.

Your strange!" she gushed. (She meant "You're," but Peter felt absolutely certain that she was one of those people who spell it "Your.")

In wondered in avenging was being used as an adjective or a verb.

The idea of forming people out of grammatical clauses seems so fantastical at the start that you hide your terror in a smokescreen of elaborate sentence making, as if character can be drawn forcibly out of the curlicues of certain adjectives piled ruthlessly on top of one another. In fact, character occurs with the lightest of brushstrokes. Naturally, it can be destroyed lightly too.

It is from his grandmother that Henry learns that punctuation can be a weapon. With a comma you can hurt someone.

Here is an appropriate use of the exclamation mark: The last thing he expected when the elevator door opened was the snarling tiger that leapt at him. "Ahhhhh!" ... In almost all situations that do not involve immediate physical danger or great surprise, you should think twice before using an exclamation mark. If you have thought twice and the exclamation mark is still there, think about it three times, or however many times it takes until you delete it.

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.

The most common prepositional error is forgetting that the noun or pronoun in a prepositional phrase is the object of the preposition. The object of the preposition must be expressed in the objective case. Who can forget Jane Russell's line, in a 1970s Playtex ad, for a bra "for we full-figured gals." The preposition for mandates the pronoun us. But, then, Russell never was known for her pronouns.

Pronouns are proxies for nouns. They stand in willingly when nouns don't want to hang around sounding repetitive. The noun (or noun phrase), whose bidding the pronoun does, is called the antecedent—because it goes (ced-) before (ante-) the pronoun in the sentence or paragraph.

What would a grammar book be if it didn't lounge around in a little Latin? Let

The technically incorrect It's me and That's me have been part of our DNA since as long as English has been recorded. There's something nice and low-key about them. Maybe we just crave a simple English equivalent of the French C'est moi .

The long form of the possessive pronoun replaces the noun. completely.

Disturber of the Peace." Miss Buncle's book intrigued Mr. Abbott, and Miss Buncle herself intrigued him. She was such a queer mixture of simplicity and subtlety (at least he thought she was). She spoke bad grammar and wrote good English. She was meticulously truthful in all she said (it was almost as if she were on oath to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth all day long and every day of the week).