[sic] or Tired

There are at least two things I think each of us should revisit at several points during our lives: a driving manual and a grammar book. We are exposed to both of these useful gems at points in our lives where hormones are raging and our brains are not yet fully developed. We use them in order to pass an exam or a class, and then the books are likely to be tossed, recycled, or stored on a shelf (in a box) not to be used again. (For those fortunate PhD students, you have approximately a six to ten year delay relative to the normal population before you abandon your writing references.)

Why should we revisit grammar? Instinctively, we tend to notice the obvious misuse: “it’s” instead of “its”, “are” instead of “our”, and the random spelling “errers”. What about those perhaps more complex rules concerning the comma or the apostrophe? Yes, most of us still have retained the memory of those “School House Rock” episodes (“Interjection!”), but have you ever wondered if the colloquialisms of our region have crept into our professional writing? Do we occasionally slip in an abbreviation in formal communication due to our tendency to express ourselves in < 140 characters? Are we content if our Word document has no green squiggly lines?

For those of you who answered “Yes, Yes or No, No” to the above questions, you might be interested in these books to refresh and perhaps entertain your brains:

• Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss
• The Chicago Manual of Style by University of Chicago Press Staff
• Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey
• The Elements of Style by William Strunk
• Sin & Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose by Constance Hale