Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose [Hardcover]

Constance Hale (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0767903080 | ISBN-13: 978-0767903080 | Edition: 1

Want your writing to sell, shock, or just sing? The acclaimed author of Wired Style presents a hip, real-world guide to the rules of grammar—and when to break them.

Today's writers need more spunk than Strunk. Whether crafted for the Great American Novel, Madison Avenue advertising, or Grammy Award-winning rap lyrics, memorable writing must jump off the page. Now, from copy veteran Constance Hale comes a fun, informative, indispensable guide to taking your writing from ordinary to extraordinary.

Sin and Syntax is more than just a style manual with examinations of sentence structure and parts of speech. In addition to spelling out the basic rules, Constance Hale teaches you when—and how—to effectively break them. Chock full of examples from traditional and nontraditional prose—from advertising jingles to song lyrics to literary classics—Sin and Syntax shows you why learning to "sin" will make you a better writer. Discover how to:

Distinguish between words that are "pearls" and words that are "potatoes"
Innovate with adjectives to avoid clichés
Avoid "couch potato thinking" and "com-mitment phobia" when choosing verbs
Use literary devices such as onomatopoeia, alliteration, and metaphor

PLUS—You'll learn:

How Rich Little boosted his comedy career with the perfected use of one particular interjection
Why Muhammad Ali's syntactically surprising speech worked as well as his jabs
Which famous opening line from American literature contains no subject whatsoever

A perfect display of Hale's own literary principles, Sin and Syntax, with its clear, crisp, modern approach to style, will be an essential guide for all those who want to improve their command of the English language.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

You gotta love a grammar guide that calls verbs "moody little suckers" and adverbs "promiscuous." Constance Hale (Wired Style) relishes prose that is deliberate, beautiful, and bold. Go ahead and break the rules, she says; just know the rules first, and know why you are breaking them. In Sin & Syntax, Hale examines the elements of grammar from four angles: the "bones" (the grammar lesson), the "flesh" (the writing lesson), "cardinal sins" (what she calls "true transgressions"), and "carnal pleasures" (the beauty that results from either "hew[ing] exquisitely to the underlying codes of language," or not).

For illustration, Hale hails Walt Whitman and Roger Angell, and rails upon Alexander Haig and the Gump's catalogue. She hauls in Joan Didion to make a case for writing in the first person, Mark Twain to promote the killing of adjectives, C.S. Lewis to advocate showing rather than telling, and Loudon Wainwright III to lament the abuse of the word like. But Hale has no problem making her own points. "Euphemisms," she says, "are for wimps." She dismisses a particularly heinous example of scholarly prose as "a bunch of big words thrown into an Osterizer." Even other grammarians don't escape her derision: "Get a grip," Hale says. "Hopefully as a sentence adverb is here to stay." But what distinguishes Sin and Syntax most is its enthusiasm for prose that takes risks. "Even if you have to check with a lawyer," says Hale, "isn't a kick-ass piece of writing worth the effort?" --Jane Steinberg

From Library Journal

Hale, editor of the hip Wired Style (LJ 10/1/96), has put together a writing/grammar manual that is fresh and fun. The basic rules are here, and they are well explained. The "sin" from the title is partly advice on when and how to break these rules. The other sins are examples of oft-repeated mistakes. Readers will not be told how to write a novel, a poem, or a newspaper article, but if they are writing one this guide will help them use effective and artful language. The examples range from Dr. Seuss books to John F. Kennedy's speeches to commercials, and a short bibliography of books on writing, grammar, and language is included. Easy to understand and appealing to a broad range of readers, this book is highly recommend for all libraries.ALisa J. Cihlar, Monroe P.L., WI
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; 1 edition (June 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767903080
• ISBN-13: 978-0767903080
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #195,369 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Constance Hale is a writer and critic based in California and Massachusetts. She grew up on the North Shore of Oahu, where she spoke grammatical English at home and Hawaiian creole (or "Pidgin English") at school and with friends. She attributes her initial fascination with language to this "bilingual upbringing." She retains close ties to Hawaii both personally and professionally--and is known to dance a killer hula.

Hale received her B.A. from Princeton, then spent a number of years writing fiction and drama, performing her own solo pieces in San Francisco coffeehouses. She completed her master's degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, then worked as a reporter and editor at the Gilroy Dispatch, the Oakland Tribune, and the San Francisco Examiner, before taking a position as copy chief at Wired magazine. There, she says, began "dabbling in the idiosyncrasies of the mother tongue," which led to the publication of Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, in 1996, and later to Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose, in 1999. She has been dubbed "Marion the Librarian on a Harley or E.B. White on acid."

Hale has written about Latin plurals and Latino culture, Berkeley politics and Hawaiian sovereignty in publications as diverse as The Atlantic Monthly, Health, Honolulu, National Geographic Adventure, Smithsonian, and Writer's Digest. Her travel essays about Hawaii and other unusual places have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, Via, and numerous anthologies.

Currently Hale teaches at Harvard University Extension School and U.C. Berkeley Extension. She speaks at writing conferences all over the country and gives workshops in both newsrooms and boardrooms. The secret to her writing: an unusual combo of classy and sassy. The secret to her teaching: making grammar and writing hilariously fun.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

78 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fun reading even for grammar know-it-alls, May 24, 2001

By 

Andrew Rasanen (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose (Hardcover)

Well structured, as it must be, Hale's guide presents both the nuts and bolts of grammar and the considerations of style that cannot exist without a sound grasp of grammar. The book begins each section simply, with the "bones" of the part of speech being explained, puts on the "flesh," and elucidates the "cardinal sins" and the "carnal pleasures" of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and so on. Even when the going gets heavy, as in her discussions of attributive nouns or appositive phrases, her clear, conversational tone smooths the way. She concludes with reflections about voice, lyricism, melody, and rhythm. One of the best features of her book is a glut of choice passages from the likes of Nabokov, Joan Didion, George Orwell, Jamaica Kincaid, and many others. Her well-read reach extends to rap lyrics and the wine labels written by the flip, clever copywriters at Bonny Doon Vineyards. The collection of quotations alone makes this book worth owning. At times the tone is slightly uneven, as when she follows a serious discussion of rules with the casual use of words like "gonna" and "wimps" (apparently she has a reputation for being hip to uphold), and she includes sentence diagrams without really explaining how they operate. Her advice to "go ahead and be ungrammatical if it feels right" may make some sticklers swoon. But these are minor flaws in a manual that is useful for beginners and seasoned writers alike. You close the book understanding how the rich inventiveness of English is rooted in its complex grammar and vocabulary, which are the reasons it can be so flexible, so magical -- the reason, in fact, that language creates reality. Includes a helpful appendix describing other grammar guides.

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars unbelievable--a grammar book that's fun to read!, September 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose (Hardcover)

This book was recommended to me by a friend, and I have to admit that I was at first reluctant to pick it up. But I do like to write, and I figured that there might be some helpful information in the book for me. I was SO SURPRISED to find that I was actually enjoying reading the book! Hale's writing is so fun, and the examples she uses are great. You can tell from the title--SIN AND SYNTAX: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose--that this is going to be more exciting than Strunk and White, which I suffered through in high school. Not only will it help you improve your writing--with real world application for careers and the like, not just for students--but you'll have fun reading. Believe it.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars grammar and style humorously demystified, August 30, 2004

By 

audrey (white mtns) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose (Paperback)

Hale gives us a guide to grammar and style that is as fun to read as it is instructive. Occasionally the mirth is a bit strained and tiresome, but better to err on the side of entertainment ....

Divided into chapters on words (nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections), sentences (subject and predicate, simple sentences, phrases and clauses, and sentence variety) and music (voice, lyricism, melody and rhythm), each chapter is divided into four sections: Bones -- the basics of grammatical usage; Flesh -- putting the grammar into context; Cardinal Sins -- highlighting errors; and Carnal Pleasures -- examples of writing that defy the rules.

The organization is mainly successful and the author uses lots of examples to show both good and bad writing. i learned from the book, re-learned a few things I'd forgotten (when's the last time you saw a sentence diagram?!), and enjoyed the book.