The Daily with Sillstein here on Anger. The Daily with Sillstein on Anger, covering Stephen King on Writing, a memoir of the Craft. Today we continue with the Toolbox and Grammar. Here we go.
Alright, let's begin. The Daily with Sillstein here on Anger. Here we begin with Stephen King on Writing, a memoir of the Craft, covering the Toolbox, Part 1. As we remember, good afternoon and happy Tuesday everyone.
This is Sylvia Stein. Welcome to the Daily with Sillstein here on Anger. Today, like we started last week with Stephen King on Writing, a memoir of the Craft. I'm going to cover part of the Toolbox part on Grammar.
I think this is a more extensive chapter, so I'm going to probably divide it into two parts or two shows. So here we go. It's on page 118 of his paperback and we're going to begin now. I hope you all are having a great day.
All music provided by GarageBand. You'll also want, first we dealt with, of course, the first part was we talked about the Toolbox and we went into vocabulary. Now you're going to break it down to Grammar. He says, you'll also want, you'll also want, excuse me, Grammar on the top shelf of your Toolbox.
And don't annoy me with your moans of exasperation or your cries that you don't understand Grammar. You never did understand Grammar. You flunked that whole semester in sophomore English, writing his fun, but Grammar sucks, the big one. That's what he writes here.
He says, relax and chill. We won't spend much time here because we don't need to. One either absorbs the grammatical principles of one's native language in conversation and in reading or one does not. What sophomore English does or tries to do is little more than naming aparts, basically.
And he says, and this is in high school. Now that you're not worried that A, your skirt is too short or too long and the other kids will laugh at you. He says, B, you're not going to make the varsity swimming team or C, you're still going to be a pimple, studded person. And when you graduate or he says probably when you die for that matter, he just names different things.
And D, the physics teacher won't grade the final on a curve or E, nobody really likes you anyway. And they never did. And this is just coming from his book. Now that all that extraneous crap is out of the way, you can study certain academic matters with a degree of concentration.
You can never manage while attending the local textbook, loony bin, he says. And once you start, you'll find you know almost all of the stuff anyway. It is. As I said, mostly a matter of cleaning the rust off the drill bits and sharpening the blade of your saw.
At least that's what he says. And we'll be right back. All right. And we're back with part two of Stephen King on writing a memoir of the craft.
And now we're dealing with a grammar section and what he said in the first segment. Now we go to the second part. It says, plus, oh to hell with it. He says, if you can remember all the accessories that go with your best outfit, the contents of your purse, the starting lineup of the new York Yankees or the Houston Oilers or what label, or what label, hang on sloppy, sloopy by the McCoy's was on, you're capable of remembering the difference between a gear on verb form used as a noun and a participle verb from verb form used as an adjective.
I'm sorry. I thought long and hard about whether or not to include a detailed section on grammar in this little book. Part of me would actually like to. I taught it successfully at high school where it had under the name, business English.
And I enjoyed it as, I enjoyed it as a student. American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar. A British advertising man with a proper education can make magazine copy for rib. Condoms sound like the magna.
He says like the magna. Damn carda. But it has its own scruffy charm. In the end, I decided against it probably for the same reason.
William Strunk decided not to recap the basics when he wrote the first edition of the Elements of Style. If you don't know, it's too late. And those really incapable of grasping grammar as I am incapable of playing certain guitar riffs and progressions will have little or no use for a book like this. Anyway, in that sense, I am preaching to the converted yet allow me to go on just a little bit further.
Will you indulge me? He says vocabulary used in speech or writing organizes itself in seven parts of speech. Eight, if you count interjections such as oh, and gosh, and forget about it. Communication composed of these parts of speech must be organized by rules of grammar upon which we agree.
When these rules break down, confusion and misunderstanding results, bad grammar produces bad sentences. My favorite example from Strunk and White is this one. As a mother of five, he has a quotation mark. As a mother of five comma with another one on the way, my reading board is always up, period, and then quote, close quotations.
Niles and verbs are the two indispensable parts of writing. Without one of each, no group of words can be a sentence. Since a sentence is by definition a group of words containing a subject, noun, and predicate verb, these strings of words begin with a capital letter and with a period and combine to make a complete thought which starts in the writer's head and then leads to the readers. And we'll be right back.
And now back with the Daily with Silstein here on anchor. Thank you for joining us on the Daily with Silstein here on anchor. Happy Tuesday. And now we're back with part three.
Okay. Okay, let's go back and repeat this. Niles and verbs are the two indispensable parts of writing. Without one of each, no group of words can be a sentence.
Since a sentence is by definition a group of words containing a subject, a noun, and a predicate, a verb, these strings of words begin with a capital letter and with a period and combine to make a complete thought which starts in the writer's head and then leads to the readers. Most, uh, must you write? It says must you write complex sentences each time, every time. Parents to thought if your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, the grammar police aren't going to come and take you away.
Even William Strunk, uh, said that, uh, he said Mussolini of rhetoric recognized the delicious playability of language. It's an old observation he writes that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric, yet he goes on to add this thought which I urge you to consider. Pay attention to this. He says, unless he is certain of doing well, it's a quotation and it says unless he is certain of doing well comma, the writer, he puts that in parentheses, will probably do best to follow the rules, period and close quotation.
The telling clause here is unless he is certain of doing well. If you don't have a rudimentary grasp of how the parts of speech translate into coherent sentences, how can you be certain that you're doing well? How will you know if you're doing ill for that matter? The answer, of course, is that you can't, you won't.
One who does grasp the rudiments, one who does grasp the rudiments, a grammar, finds a comforting simplicity at its heart, where there need be only nouns, the words that name, the words that name and verbs, the words that act. Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you'll have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode.
Jane transmits. Mountains float. These are all perfect sentences. Many such thoughts make little rational sense, but even the stranger ones plums defy.
Have a kind of poetic weight that's nice. The simplicity of noun verb construction is useful. At the very least, it can provide a safety net for your writing. Strunk and white caution against too many simple sentences in a row, but simple sentences, he says, provide a path.
You can follow when you fear getting lost in the tangles of rhetoric. All those restrictive and undistrictive, non-restrictive clauses, those modifying phrases, those opposites, and compound complex sentences, you start to freak out at the right at the site, sorry, of each unmapped territory. Unmapped by you at least, just remind yourself that rocks explode. And we'll be right back.
And now we're back for the Daily with Sillstein here on Anchor. Covering, Stephen King on writing, a memoir of the craft. The section on Toolbox. Grammar.
And welcome back. We left off where it says, just remind yourself that rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float.
And plums defy. Grammar is not just a pain in the ass. It's a pull you grab to to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking. Besides, all those simple sentences work for Hemingway, didn't they?
Even when he was drunk on his A or S, he wasn't, and he was a colorful word genius. If you want to refresh your grammar, go to your local use bookstore and find a copy of Warreners, W-A-W-R-R-I-N-E-R apostrophe S, English Grammar, he says. And composition. The same book most of us took home and dutifully covered with brown paper bag, brown paper shopping bags when we were sophomores and juniors in high school.
You'll be relieved and delighted, I think, to find that almost all you need is summarized on the front and back end papers of the book. And we'll be right back with the wrap up for today. And now we're back to the wrap up here on the Daily here on Anchor. The wrap up here on the Daily with Sillstein here on Anchor.
Covering the book by Stephen King on Writing, a memoir of The Craft, the chapter on Writing of the Toolbox, and Grammar. Alright, and we're back with the wrap up. For today, we covered part of the Toolbox, and we did the first section on writing, the little introduction on that on his book. And then we did, the first part was vocabulary, now he's talking about Grammar.
And we will finish that section probably on Thursday or Friday of this week. We'll cover the next segment of this section, and then next week, we'll do the next sections that come. I hope you enjoyed the Daily with Sillstein here on Anchor, covering the book by Stephen King on Writing. I hope you all have a fantastic Tuesday.
I hope you'll call in and let us know, or let me know what you think of the show and what we're doing. And I hope you'll check out the interviews, and I really hope you enjoyed today's show. I will let you go now, and we'll be right back, or we'll be back with a new show, finishing up on the Stephen King on Writing, a memoir of The Craft, covering the Toolbox on Grammar. And I hope you'll join us again, and have a happy Tuesday, everyone.
Thank you for joining us. This has been the Daily with Sillstein on Anchor. We'll be back on Thursday. The Daily with Sillstein here on Anchor.
Happy Tuesday.