By Ellen Jovin
Seeing people reading physical books makes me happy. At local coffee shops, I regularly run into Ronald Meltzer, an Upper West Sider with bibliophilic tendencies. I don’t know much about Ron other than that he is a prolific reader. Every time I see him he is reading a physical book. Usually it’s a large book.
He’s currently making his way through Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, but I’ve also seen him with Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Truman by David McCullough, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wuthering Heights, and more. War and Peace is on his list for 2026. Ron is not distracted by devices. Ron reads and reads. It’s relaxing to cross paths with Ron and see what his latest book is.
Reading is great for all kinds of reasons, but since this is a grammar column, I will focus on why reading is great for grammar. Grammar is stretchy, and reading demonstrates its stretchiness. Sometimes when people insist on the universal truth of a questionable grammar point, I provide them with examples from published works that contradict their assertions.
Apparently this is considered by some to be an annoying habit, so I pre-apologize to you for the examples below.
“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perked to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licour / Of which vertu engendred is the flour” is not very readable for most modern readers. The Middle English of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was different from ours in all kinds of ways. But people don’t tend to accuse Chaucer of bad grammar, even though he most definitely did not follow Associated Press style.
The above excerpt is conspicuous evidence of conspicuous language change. Language evolves, and it does not stop evolving because we are born. In addition, language habits are not monolithic; there’s variety all around us.
Consider this: “The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.”
That’s the first sentence of Babbit, a 1922 novel by the Nobel Prize–winning author Sinclair Lewis. And that semicolon is a weird one by modern U.S. standards. But even though I never use semicolons in this way, I don’t look at that sentence and say, “Oh, too bad Lewis didn’t know how to punctuate.”
The first sentence of Wuthering Heights, a book read by countless schoolchildren, is this: “1801—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.”
Let’s just ignore that “neighbour” spelling. Much more exciting is the concluding preposition—in the very first sentence! Emily Brontë did not even wait until the second sentence to demonstrate her freedom from the widely followed yet linguistically unsupported constraint on ending with prepositions.
Now here’s a line that has been read by additional countless young readers: “My father gets Playboy and I’ve seen those girls in the middle.” That’s Judy Blume, who has sold more than 90 million books, and the sentence is from Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I have worked with many people who believe a comma is obligatory before the word “and” when it combines two independent clauses. But comma-free compound sentences like this one are ubiquitous. And in my opinion Judy Blume can punctuate as she likes, on top of which I also happen to like her punctuation.
How about this one? “Joad took the bottle from him, and in politeness did not wipe the neck with his sleeve before he drank.”
That sentence is from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Like Lewis, Steinbeck won a Nobel Prize in Literature. Based on extensive life experience with punctuators, however, I am confident that many people would argue the comma before the “and” is wrong—because it doesn’t lie between two independent clauses and is instead simply combining two verb phrases.
But there are multiple acceptable comma solutions to this sentence. You could put zero, one, two, or three commas and still be right. That’s the thing. We regularly have choices in our sentences. It’s too bad if we end up writing as though we don’t.
We are too bossy about tiny writing details in this country. Reading is a reminder that many of the rules we walk around with in our heads simply do not govern, have not governed, the history of writing in English. I would like for people to feel less prescriptive about what we are allowed to do. Some things are real rules. Some things are superstitions.
Knowing the difference is freeing. And it allows us to focus more on what is important—the content and the art of our language, the things that allow book-loving brains to soar.
Ellen Jovin is the author of the national bestseller Rebel with a Clause and the subject of a grammar docu-comedy by Brandt Johnson, also called Rebel with a Clause, currently playing at theaters around the country. You’ll find a complete collection of her columns for the WSR — HERE.
Subscribe to West Side Rag’s FREE email newsletter here. And you can Support the Rag here.
People don’t read much anymore, it seems, and what a pity. There is some great film, but not as a replacement for the written word, for goodness sake!! If I post on Facebook about a book I read, someone responds with a film or podcast on the subject! Ken Burns! Schindler’s List! And then there’s the idiot box. My favorite columnists are countered with Rachel Maddow. We haven’t had a television for many years now and don’t miss it one bit. I read the news, in print and online. Just about all I listen to is music.
I adore you Ellen Jovin and I think Judy Blume left that comma out so the sentence would read as it would be spoken, like this one.
From your fan, and English major, Raleigh.
Thank you so much, and happy 2026! 🥳
I have seen the movie Rebel with a Clause twice. Ellen Jovin excels at combining education and humor. She really makes you think by juxtaposing grammar purists and grammar manglers.
During my six years in high school, I studied Latin and Greek, the founding mother and father of most Western languages. Both Latin and Greek are very rigid and allow no grammatical compromises. In addition, French is one of my two native languages; and, please, never mess around with French grammar; l’Académie Française will come after you with a hatchet. By contrast, Ellen Jovin’s approach exudes tolerance and flexibility.
During Covid I took many online classes, including English Grammar Boot Camp by Professor Anne Curzan from the University of Michigan. Professor Curzan makes a sharp distinction between prescriptive grammar (the way it should be) and descriptive grammar (the way people actually talk). Just like Rebel with a Clause, those classes were an eye opener, especially for someone who was taught that grammar is inflexible and chiseled in stone.
Over time, descriptive grammar may very well push prescriptive grammar to the sidelines. What I learned from both teachers is to be more tolerant and less judgmental when people follow loosely or totally butcher rules I was told were immutable.
Interestingly, Latin and (ancient) Greek are not the founding mother and father of our dear English. English is from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages, and Latin is from the Italic branch, Greek from the Hellenic. Of course, English does have a very substantial number of loan words from French (Italic), but Latin and Greek are more like great-great-aunts/uncles than parents of modern English.
Ancient Greek lacks the relatively fixed word order of modern English, though some semantic units are kept together (and there are a number of other exceptions). For the most part, rather than understanding what is eating what in the sentence “The boy ate the bagel” by recognizing the subject-verb-object word order, Socrates would’ve done so by looking for markers attached to most words (so it could be “Ate-verb form bagel-object-marker boy-subject marker”). Thus ancient Greek reads as weirdly fluid to a modern English speaker. Except that Socrates never ate a bagel. Too bad!
Ellen Jovin excels at combining education and humor; she makes you think by juxtaposing grammar purists and grammar manglers.
Having studied Latin and Greek, and being a native French speaker, I always saw grammar as something chiseled in stone. By contrast, Ellen Jovin introduces tolerance and flexibility.
“Rebel with a Clause” reminds me of the online university course “English Grammar Boot Camp” by Professor Anne Curzan (University of Michigan). Just like Jovin’s book, those classes are a revelation for someone who was taught that grammar is beyond discussion. Professor Curzan differentiates between prescriptive grammar (the way it should be) and descriptive grammar (the way people actually talk), with the latter gradually pushing the former to the side.
What I learned from both teachers is to be more tolerant when people barely follow or totally ignore grammatical rules. Basically, clear communication matters more than flawless communication.