Amazon link to The Glamor of Grammar

I write this little review for the sake of my #writer friends on X (formerly Twitter) and because it was a nice book pointing to many helpful writing notions. There are a lot of chapters, but they are all brief. The author’s aim seems to be a general overview of the writing forest, beginning with its soil and nutrients (letters and words), progressing to its more significant structures, tree types, and forest ecology (sentences, paragraphs, dialog, metaphor, and theme). How do you like my forest metaphor?

Clark literally begins with the letters A, B, C, etc. In particular, how some letters have come to function in English. He moves to words: simple words, more complex words, some history, and some observations of their impact, hard, soft, ambivalent, etc. He admonishes writers to watch their spelling. From words, we move to punctuation and sentences. Punctuation books are mostly dull, but not this one. Clark taught me nuances in using commas versus semi-colons or M-dash versus parentheses, which I hadn’t considered before. It turns out that setting off an independent clause is not the only possibility for the lowly semi-colon!

Sentences and paragraphs are the center of the business. Many forms serve particular purposes… Chains of short words are dramatic and hurried. Longer words strung together suggest slower moods. He addresses consistent usage of active and passive voice, present and past tense, uses and abuses of alliteration, and a little about authorial point of view. I like his attitude. Rules are general principles of good usage, but when you show that you know them, you can break them when there is a literary purpose for the exception.

Finally, moving from the soil to the treetops, he looks at the forest from the sky and comments on thematic consistency, metaphor, and the application of all that has gone before to a thread that ties the writing together. 

There are a lot of chapters, but as noted above, they are all short, two or three pages. All of Clark’s many subjects are presented on a high level. There are interesting acorns—using my forest metaphor to tie my theme together—everywhere. Whether a writer or an inveterate reader, this little book has insights to be found.