Features a comprehensive, comprehensible A to Z list covering acronyms and when to use them, computer buzzwords and when to lose them, and playful additions to your literary lexicon. Softcover.
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.
