By Geoffrey Pullum. That is what it says at the beginning of the section headed “VERBS” in William Zinsser’s much respected book On Writing Well. The front cover of the book announces that more than a million copies have been sold (more than 1,000,001 now, because I bought a copy of the 30th-anniversary edition at the University of Pennsylvania bookstore last week). More...
By Lucy Ferriss. My friend Robb Forman Dew, who won the National Book Award for her first novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death, recently received more than 50 comments on her Facebook post. More...
By Ben Yagoda. On Saturday, my wife was going through some old papers and found a letter her cousin Bob Terese had written to his parents on March 22, 1945 — almost precisely 70 years ago. He was a Chicago kid, 20 years old at the time. More...
By Allan Metcalf. That’s the grammatical puzzle posed by a newly popular Scottish ballad. It’s a strange song, as well as a haunting one, that begins every episode of the Starz series Outlander. Based on Diana Gabaldon’s time-traveling novels, the TV series is an impressively realistic re-creation of life in Scotland in the 1740s, to which the 20th-century heroine, Claire Beauchamp, finds herself transported. More...
By Anne Curzan. Seven hundred and seventeen comments in four days. The readers of The Wall Street Journal have many feelings about grammar.
On March 13, the Wall Street Journal published an essay by Oliver Kamm titled “There Is No ‘Proper English.’” In it Kamm makes arguments with which I wholeheartedly agree. More...
By Chronicle Staff. Report: “The Second Year of Accelerating Opportunity: Implementation Findings From the States and Colleges”By Chronicle Staff. Report: “Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women’s Success in Engineering and Computing”Organization: American Association of University WomenBy Andrew Mytelka. Andrew Ross, a faculty member at New York University who has been a sharp critic of the abuse of migrant workers in the construction of its campus in the United Arab Emirates, is the target of a mysterious investigation, The New York Times reports. An investigator has been seeking out “people to comment negatively” about him, the Times says, but has refused to disclose who hired her. More...
By Steve Kolowich. Lawyers representing a group of Sweet Briar College alumnae sent a letter on Monday to the college’s lawyer demanding the president and the Board of Directors step down or face a possible legal challenge. More...
By Andy Thomason. Higher education’s focus on sustainability seriously undermines free inquiry and debate on college campuses, a new report from the National Association of Scholars argues. The report, entitled “Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism,” also argues that colleges’ sustainability efforts are too costly at a time when graduates are struggling to pay off loan debtThe New York State attorney general’s office is investigating the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art’s controversial decision to charge undergraduate tuition for the first time in its history, The Wall Street Journal reports. The prestigious New York City institution’s decision to begin charging tuition, first for graduate students, then for undergrads, sparked intense protests and a lawsuit. More...
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