Review by Choice Review
Making Sense complements Crystal's recent books on spelling and punctuation--Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling, and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling (CH, May'14, 51-4856) and Making a Point: The Persnickity Story of English Punctuation (2015)--offering an equally well-informed and sensible perspective on grammar. Comprising 29 brief chapters, Making Sense speaks both to those new to grammar and to those with some expertise. For those new to grammar, Crystal's systematic, avuncular exposition painlessly introduces concepts, keywords, and grammatical reasoning. For aficionados, Crystal provides depth and perspective--and for teachers new ideas. The book first introduces parts of speech, clauses, and grammatical functions by tracing the language development of Crystal's daughter. Next comes a set of chapters on the role of grammar in communication and the importance of semantics and context. Crystal rounds out the book by discussing grammar change (and resistance to change) and the educational consequences of do-as-I-say-ism. Many chapters offers interludes, as the author calls them, in which the history of grammar and grammar teaching are brought to life. Making Sense ends with a summary of ten principles about grammar--not grammar rules but rather key ideas that encapsulate Crystal's view of grammar as an intellectual enterprise--along with an appendix on grammar teaching and testing. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Edwin L. Battistella, Southern Oregon University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
The indefatigable linguist Crystal's latest book, "Making Sense," is a surprisingly entertaining historical and scholarly tour of the mechanics of English. Grammar can seem as technical and offputting as math or physics to many people who nevertheless can speak, read and write very well, and while some books on language prey on readers' insecurity with lists of word-choice peeves and classist language shibboleths, Crystal efficiently punctures such snobbery. His approach is to explain the points of grammar and their natural acquisition in the order in which a toddler develops language skills, a brilliant strategy that allows him to begin with the most basic concepts and build upon them while simultaneously exemplifying the descriptive nature of his work. He illustrates the lingering "pernicious" effects of trying to fit the square peg of English into the round hole of Latin grammar, responsible for centuries of confusing information about how English works. Discussions of semantics (what we are trying to say) and pragmatics (how we are trying to say it) give a more concrete nature to grammar, and are used effectively here to explain away the silly admonition against the passive voice in writing. A primer on corpus linguistics and a short explanation of how our language evolved from Old English help complete Crystal's masterly telling of why a living language's grammar, like its vocabulary, is not only unfinished, it is unfinishable. One could not have a more genial guide for such a tour. PETER SOKOLOWSKI is editor at large at Merriam-Webster.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 27, 2017]
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A celebrated historian of the English language takes us on an entertaining stroll through the history of our grammarfrom the beginning to last week.As prolific as he is knowledgeable about our language, Crystal has written with erudition and wit about subjects as varied as the pronunciation of Shakespeare's English (The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation, 2016) and the language's odd spelling (Spell It Out, 2013). Here, the author has several related intents: to explain what grammar is (and isn't), provide a history of our grammar, illustrate some common grammatical issues, show the varieties of English, chide (gently) our many unyielding prescriptivists (he does call them "pedants" a couple of times), and make general recommendations about the teaching and testing of grammar. The chapters are brief and tightly focused, many followed by an interlude that deals with a specific issue that lies, only slightly, outside the texte.g., the ways we pluralize our nouns and some stories of the earliest grammarians. Crystal's prose is generally light and accessible, though there are times (see the chapter about the evolution of English from Old to today) when his diction and discussion could dissuade the timorous. Some fussy readers may be surprised (or pleased?) to see his use of "mindset" and "refers back," but he displays a similar joy in "catching" some recent grammar and usage absolutists who commit the very errors they condemn. Throughout, the author is a gifted, agile, and amusing teacher, traits we see in his passages about how it would go if we were able to chat with Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. He also shows how prescriptive grammar rose and fell, replaced by descriptive, and how much standardized grammar testing for youngsters is flawed. Both a swift introduction for grammar rookies and an enlightening review and update for the veterans. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
