If you have been in one of America’s 50 states lately, you might have seen Ellen Jovin.
In 2018, Jovin had a burst of inspiration. A lifelong grammar nerd, she decided to set up a table in Manhattan and answer questions about grammar.
Really.
Why didn’t I think of that?
Sitting at the 72nd Street subway station on the Upper West Side or near Central Park, she hung out a sign inviting passers-by to ask questions about periods and prepositions, colons and semicolons, run-on sentences and Oxford commas, and a whole lot more. Most people, of course, just walk on. New Yorkers are in a hurry, you know. But many stopped by—first out of curiosity, then with real problems to solve and arguments to press.
When she became a regular presence, Jovin got some media attention. Then she got a book contract. Then she took a 50-state tour to expose America to her passions.
Ellen Jovin is a cofounder of Syntaxis, a communication skills training consultancy, and the author of four books on language—the most recent one being the bestseller Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian (HarperCollins, July 2022). Her other books include Writing for Business, English at Work,* and Essential Grammar for Business.
She earned a B.A. from Harvard College in German studies and an M.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles in comparative literature. For grins, she has studied 25 languages. She lives with her husband, Brandt Johnson, not far from the World Headquarters of the Grammar Table in New York.
I first saw you outside the 72nd Street subway station in New York. Your popup table reminded me of Lucy’s setup on “Peanuts.” What made you think of turning writing and grammar into a public event? Is it even more than that— performance art, for example?
I never had any inclination to be a performer, so I’d say no to the performance art idea. I happen to love talking to strangers, and I love talking about grammar and language, and I was sick of being online so many hours a day. I wanted to be outside, in light and air and with people. Those were my main reasons.
What is fascinating to you about the mechanics of writing? Do you see writing as a kind of system or machine? Or is it about relationships?
I am drawn to excellent writing for its art and beauty, and I am also drawn to—and delighted by—the technical details. On complicated projects, I tend to write a whole bunch of stuff quickly, creating a big, chaotic mess many times longer than I need, and then I clean it up by going through that chaotic mess hundreds of times. When I edit my work, I suppose I am often thinking about the pieces of a sentence in a technical way, but it is so automatic that it doesn’t feel separate to me from the aesthetic qualities.
Someone recently asked me about a subject-verb agreement problem in a sentence, and I responded that it was technically correct but hard to read because the subject plus modifiers contained eighteen words—three prepositional phrases and one relative clause with a total of six different nouns and pronouns that shifted back and forth from singular to plural—so even though the verb was technically right, it was a failure stylistically. My impression is that I experience style more technically than most writers do.
Who are your favorite writers and why? How do these authors speak to you? How much is intellectual and how much is emotional?
I don’t have favorite writers, at least not now. I love so many. One of my most joyful experiences as a reader was when I was in my mid-twenties. I had just left graduate school in Los Angeles and moved to New York, and I could suddenly read whatever I wanted without having to take exams and write papers with deadlines, and I was constantly excited about it. Those first couple of years I regularly bought books on the street at St. Mark’s Place.
I read dozens of novels, many of them English-language novels that English majors might have read in college but that I hadn’t, because I wasn’t an English major. Instead I had studied German and then comparative literature. I had already done a lot of reading in various other literatures, and in English I had intentionally read a lot of works outside of the traditional canon, and I loved all of it, but there were so many books left for me to read by some of the standard big names in English literature.
It was like living in a magic land to be able to plow through book after book by Edith Wharton, all the Brontës, Dreiser, Thackeray. Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Dickens, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and a whole lot of others. For a small amount of money, way smaller than the cost of a television, I could buy compactly packaged worlds of words off the street.
OK, now I am wondering if frequenting book stalls in the early 1990s made me more likely to have a Grammar Table. Never thought of that before. Hmmm.
Oh, and the feeling is both intellectual and emotional. It’s a soaring feeling of joy like the one I get when I climb a steep trail and then get to look down at spectacular scenery below.
I’ve always thought that grammar is easy—or easy enough to write well—once you care. So the challenge, in mastering writing, is to care. Just like kids easily memorize sports statistics and teenagers remember arcane song lyrics, we master what we pay real attention to. Angela Lunsford at Stanford argues that people are better writers today because they have more opportunities to find an audience. What do you think of these musings?
How delightful to hear that! I say that all the time, though I think the benefits are not distributed evenly across personality type. I personally think social media transformed my writing life. It gave me free daily outlets for creativity and a way to geek out about grammar and language with people around the world. It’s because of Facebook that I ended up in tons of online language groups, and that’s how I got sucked into too much computer time, and that in turn has a lot to do with how I ended up outside at the Grammar Table.
Even now I still love discussing language topics on social media, and Twitter and Mastodon are fantastic for language polls about usage and punctuation and grammar. One thing about the online audience: To benefit fully, you have to have empathy and enough training or innate writing sophistication that you can actually pick up on the details of reader responses and the reasons for them. It is also far from automatic that well-intentioned, thoughtful people know how not to feel devastated when other people are mean.
Regarding what you said about caring: Yes, caring is key. How you make young people (or anyone) care about certain useful topics they tend not to care about automatically is an endless instructional and motivational challenge. I always loved grammar, even when I was in grade school. It tickled my brain. I was fortunate enough to have great instruction from first grade through the end of my education, but on top of that, grammar was like the idea equivalent of ice cream for me. I just wanted it. I didn’t want to perform in school plays—I wanted to do more sentence diagramming.
What surprises you about the questions people ask and how they get invested in the writing process? Can you think of two or three strange (or just memorable) characters you have met on your travels?
I am not surprised all that often, at least not in this realm. I’ve been around a while, you know! But because I have not spent a lot of time in the South, those Grammar Table stops were among my favorite—and for me the most educational.
A man in New Orleans didn’t like that object pronouns were called object pronouns. He thought that was dehumanizing and suggested that I, as a language professional, might be in a position to do something about picking less objectifying grammatical terms. I enjoyed that.
And then there was the construction worker I met in Decatur, Alabama, who was obsessed with punctuation and apostrophes, who loved calligraphy, and who was thoroughly annoyed by people who wrote “ya’ll” rather than “y’all.” He surprised me.
So you have now been in all 50 states with your amazing road show. What do regional differences tell you about writing—about what varies and why, and also about what is the same everywhere?
People move around a lot in this country, so everywhere I went, I met people from somewhere else. Mostly people had similar questions across state borders. In Ohio I was asked about the status of “ain’t” twice—more than in any other state—and I was also asked what I meant by “grammar” more in the South than elsewhere, but I don’t make much of the former (it’s not statistically significant) or much of the latter either.
I don’t think people understood less about grammar in the South, but it would make sense if a word associated with judgmental editorial orthodoxy were approached more tentatively in a region whose dialects are often picked on by the rest of the US.
How can mastery of grammar and mechanics help people to find their own distinctive style? Do you see this with your favorite writers?
When I look at a piece of writing, I really cannot tell how the writers got there. Was that cool sentence with a record-challenging string of opening dependent clauses leading up to a single punchy, zingy independent clause thought through grammatically by the writer and intentionally structured that way? Could the writer name the grammatical elements? And how much did an editor rewrite the person’s work? No idea.
I am confident that most skilled writers feel their way through sentences rather than engage in clause-counting. That’s true for me too, most of the time, and I think it’s the way it should be. Our grammatical explanations followed language; they didn’t predate it. I just happen to like supplementing my instincts with super-geeky technical analyses. Everyone has their hobbies.
Being closer to language and more aware of language, however you choose to acquire that awareness, helps people become more themselves in writing. Getting older helps a lot too. On average, people become more likely to say what they want to say as they age. Therefore, I recommend aging.
OK, seriously: How in the world can anyone ever not use the Oxford comma? It’s bad enough that some editors disdain it. You could write that off as a personal quirk. But for style guides to ban the O-comma is unthinkable and even unconscionable. What does that tell you about human nature?
Nice try, Charlie, but you are not going to get me to stop sticking up for the people who omit it. Despite the memes and public disputes and even litigation, I remain attached to my agnosticism on this point. “I ate carrots, celery and cucumbers” means exactly the same thing as “I ate carrots, celery, and cucumbers.” I currently use the Oxford comma, and I usually like it, and I sometimes even insist on it, but this is not an issue that rouses my passion.
Is the phone ruining people’s reading experience by making it so easy to get off to read a text, search a topic, or check social media?
Ugh, this question distresses me. I am struggling with this issue. I don’t want to discuss it publicly right now. I will come back when I am emotionally prepared to look at the damage caused to my attention span.
*Sorry, Ellen, the Oxford Comma is not optional.
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