When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda

When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda

What do you get when you mix nine parts of speech, one great writer, and generous dashes of insight, humor, and irreverence? One phenomenally entertaining language book.

In his waggish yet authoritative book, Ben Yagoda has managed to undo the dark work of legions of English teachers and libraries of dusty grammar texts. Not since School House Rock have adjectives, adverbs, articles, conjunctions, interjections, nouns, prepositions, pronouns, and verbs been explored with such infectious exuberance. Read If You Catch an Adjective, Kill It and:

Learn how to write better with classic advice from writers such as Mark Twain (If you catch an adjective, kill it), Stephen King (I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs), and Gertrude Stein (Nouns . . . are completely not interesting).

Marvel at how a single word can shift from adverb (I did okay), to adjective (It was an okay movie), to interjection (Okay ), to noun (I gave my okay), to verb (Who okayed this?), depending on its use.

Avoid the pretentious preposition at, a favorite of real estate developers (e.g., The Shoppes at White Plains).

Laugh when Yagoda says he shall call anyone a dork to the end of his days who insists on maintaining the distinction between shall and will.

Read, and discover a book whose pop culture references, humorous asides, and bracing doses of discernment and common sense convey Yagoda's unique sense of the beauty, the joy, the artistry, and the fun of language.

Yagoda, Ben: -

Ben Yagoda is the author of About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Will Rogers. He is coeditor, with Kevin Kerrane, of The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism, and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The American Scholar, Esquire, and many other publications. Yagoda directs the journalism department at the University of Delaware, where he teaches nonfiction writing. He lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two daughters.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780767920780
ISBN 10	0767920783
Title	When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It
Author	Ben Yagoda
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Broadway Books (A Division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc)
Year published	2007-12-26
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.