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When I was researching my book on the New Yorker, I discovered that in decades past--roughly the 1920s through the 1950s--light verse thrived in the pages of the magazine. What I mean by light verse is rhymed poetry: sometimes meant to be ha-ha funny, as in the work of the only...   Read more

My latest book

"When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse" (the title comes from Mark Twain) does for the parts of speech what "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" did for punctuation. Sort of.
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Other books by Ben Yagoda


Ben Yagoda teaches English, journalism and writing at the University of Delaware, and is the author, coauthor or editor of nine books, including /The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing/ and/ About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made/. He has written about language, writing and other topics for Slate.com, the New York Times Book Review and Magazine, the American Scholar, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and many other publications. He lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.