I love reading Chick lit. For the uninitiated, that’s fiction targeted at single women around 30 years of age, consisting of a good dose of humor and maybe some romance in it.

“Although usually including romantic elements, women’s fiction (including chick lit) is generally not considered a direct subcategory of the romance novel genre, because in women’s fiction the heroine’s relationship with her family or friends may be equally as important as her relationship with the hero.”, says Wikipedia.

Of course, I have already read “The Devil wears Prada”, “Everyone worth Knowing” and “Chasing Harry Winston”, by the author Lauren Weisberger. They are classic examples of chick lit.

 One author I discovered recently was Megan Crane. I read her “English as a second language”, which was hilarious, engaging, and kept me company as only a friend could! It also happens to be her first novel.

The story is about Alexandra Brennan, who decides to leave the US and her dead-end job there to study her Master’s in English Literature in the UK. All because her ex-boyfriend said she didn’t have it in her. She makes new friends, adopts a nocturnal lifestyle that involves hanging out at the pub, sleepwalks through classes during the day, draws a motley crew of friends and acquaintances toward her with whom she experiences several misadventures, only to discover that she has found home. What sets this book apart is the author’s AMAZING sense of humour. Each sentence is hilarious. The writing style is light and irreverent. I can’t wait to read her other titles “Names my sisters call me”, “Frenemies”, and “Everyone else’s girl”.

If there is one book on punctuation I’d recommend to everyone, it’s “Eats shoots and leaves” by Lynne Truss. In this book, Lynne Truss has dealt with all matters related to punctuation in a humorous and engaging fashion. This not only removes the “boring” tag associated with the subject of punctuation, but also gets people involved in punctuating well.

The very title of the book is derived from a famous joke, which has done its rounds all over the world. In case you haven’t heard it, here goes… 

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. 

“Why?” asks the confused waiter as the panda leaves the café. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. 

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up”. 

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 

“Panda: Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” 

In case you are still wondering what that meant…the trick is in the comma placed after “Eats” in “Eats, shoots and leaves.” This comma implies that someone eats something, shoots, and then leaves the scene. The correct entry, of course, would be “Eats shoots and leaves” minus the comma after “Eats” to imply eating shoots ( as in bamboo shoots) and leaves( of plants and trees). 

Now that I have killed the punchline and demystified the joke completely, wouldn’t you agree that a misplaced comma can totally change the meaning of a sentence or a phrase? 

By giving real-life examples from badly written street signs (Come inside for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s) to improperly punctuated movie titles( Two weeks notice), this book is a ready reckoner for people with a sense of humor. She covers apostrophes, commas, dashes, hyphens, and even emoticons (keeping in mind the Instant Messaging era).  

I just noticed one glaring (at least to an ex-editor) error, though. The title page of the book says “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”. If she had read her own chapter on hyphens, that should have been “The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”. 

That shouldn’t stop you from reading the book, though :) 

Should we write as we speak or speak as we write?

According to Jyoti Sanyal, author of “Indlish—the book for every English-Speaking Indian”, this debate has been going on for centuries. He says that written English began as a write-as-you speak movement. Casual, simple writing was encouraged. A good example of this is Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which was very close to the speech of that time. Fifty years later, Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) felt that plain English was not ornate enough and encouraged people to speak as they would write. Thus, began flowery language. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) reversed the rule again when he said that poetry should use the real language of men. Then, the Victorians brought back pompous writing into vogue. The famous Charles Dickens’ character Micawber in David Copperfield was so afraid of speaking ordinarily that he always wrote down something in stilted English and read it out!

The King’s English, published in 1901, told aspiring writers to be ‘direct, simple, brief, vigorous and lucid’. This trend has more or less continued. Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” that all writers refer to also advocates simplicity and clarity of thought in writing. We are asked to “omit needless words” and “avoid a succession of loose sentences”. In the chapter on style, Strunk and White advises us to write in a way that comes naturally to us and use words and phrases that come readily to hand.

But it’s a particularly Indian trait to equate “impressive” English with incomprehensible English. We use high-sounding words, words that are archaic, stilted, and no longer in vogue just to sound educated and prove that we are intellectual.

However, with globalization of the economy and outsourcing, we are now trying to embrace American English. Americans are known for their informal, direct and casual communication.

While writing marketing collateral, we’ve been trained to be direct and pragmatic, and to omit “marketing fluff” or jargon. We are encouraged to stick to what’s familiar, speaking in the reader’s own language. Direct, clear writing that is refreshing in its simplicity is the need of the hour. Even the client endorsements we provide in our collateral need to sound genuine, like someone would have actually said them; not something they were persuaded to come up with for the sake of it.

http://www.askoxford.com/worldofwords/newwords/?view=print

Here is the link to David Crystal’s Blog.

http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/

David Crystal is an authority on the English Language. Here’s a brief introduction to the man who needs no introduction among linguists:)

http://www.sfep.org.uk/pub/biogs/crystal.asp

Enter a book you like and the site will analyse its database of real readers’
favourite books (over 32,000 and growing) to suggest what you could read next.
http://whatshouldireadnext.com/

Here are some really useful sites on UK and US English:

http://english2american.com/index.html#index

http://www.hps.com/~tpg/ukdict/

Bucknor: (n) (adj)
1. Temporary blindness leading to missing out on the obvious.
2. To be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
3. Situations leading to grave judgmental errors.
Usage: I feel bucknored by my boss;  Life often throws a bucknor at you.

Benson: (n) (adj)
1. Something that legitimises a severe bucknor.
Usage: First they bucknored me and then they bensoned it! I am toast.
Also see bucknor

Ideas, Out of Stock!

   – (04-11-2007)

Source:http://week.manoramaonline.com/cgi-bin/MMOnline.dll/portal/ep/theWeekContent.do?BV_ID=@@@&contentType=EDITORIAL&sectionName=TheWeek%20Last%20Word&programId=1073754894&contentId=3109328