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I was pleased a couple of weeks ago to be mentioned by writing guru Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute. That is, until I saw that he was using me as an example of what not to do. Roy's column was about what he called "the trap": being tempted (by the presence of a lot of... 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.
Read more... Buy The Book
"All hail to Ben Yagoda!"
-Cynthia Ozick
[The] defining characteristics of good prose [are]: a preference for short sentences diversified by an occasionally very long one; a tone that is relaxed and almost colloquial; a large vocabulary that enjoys exploiting the different etymological and social levels of words; and an insistence on verbal and logical precision.
-F.W. Bateson
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.