It's bittersweet to say, but today marks my final Word Nerd Wednesday post. After four years at Scholastic (three of which were spent blogging for OOM), I'm moving on to a new role at a different company. A huge thanks to the OOM team and our incredible readers for such an awesome chapter!
Since I'll no longer be keeping up the Word Nerd Wednesday series, I figured I'd better leave you with a list of grammatical must-reads—links I'd saved in hopes that I'd one day blog about them.
A few basics to get you started:
- Why do Brits say "maths" and Americans say "math"? (via Slate)
- The case against the phrase "no problem" (via NPR)
- A forecast of new words for 2015 (via The Wall Street Journal)
- When your punctuation says it all (via The New York Times)
- Punctuation equilibrium (via The Atlantic)
- Reasons it's so hard to catch your own typos (via Wired)
Fellow English majors will relate:
- Why teach grammar? (via Huffington Post)
- Why teach English? (via The New Yorker)
- 6 creative uses of sentence diagramming (via Mental Floss)
- Grammar lovers split over infinitives (via The Guardian)
A look at the importance of punctuation from an historical standpoint:
- Could Jefferson's punctuation change the meaning of the Declaration of Independence? (via The Washington Post)
- What New York slang did we get from the Dutch? (via New York Historical Society)
- History's most heinous typos (via Huffington Post)
- 8 punctuation marks that are no longer used (via Huffington Post)
Refreshers on commonly misused words:
- Infographic: Simple writing mistakes you should never make (via Ragan)
- 16 unfortunate misuses of punctuation (via Mashable)
- 32 incorrectly used words that can make you look bad (via Inc)
- 11 weird spelling facts (via PR Daily)
- 7 idioms almost everyone gets wrong (another from PR Daily)
- The NPR grammar hall of shame
Let's get granular, shall we? These articles focus on specific punctuation:
- The long and fascinating history of quotation marks (via Slate)
- The case against—please hear me out—the em dash (also via Slate)
- What the... (another from Slate)
- Parenthesis don't belong in your copy—or do they? (via PR Daily)
- The accidental history of the @ symbol (via Smithsonian magazine)
- The imagined lives of punctuation marks (via The Wire)
- Writers' favorite punctuation marks (also via The Wire)
BONUS:
- 15 gifts for punctuation nerds and language lovers (via Mental Floss)
Image via Ryan Hyde on Flickr
