In her first little book, our own Meredith Forrester uses Donald Trump’s tweets to explain the nuts and bolts of grammar and punctuation in a way that anyone, even the president of the United States, can understand.

If you know Meredith, you’ll know that the sum of what she knows about English grammar, punctuation, style and usage barely fits inside an encyclopædia of English grammar, punctuation, style and usage. But now she’s distilled it into a little blue stocking-stuffer that uses the power of grammar to copyedit the most powerful man in the world down to size. 

This gift-able guide to usage and style is published by Thames & Hudson Australia, and you’re in for a tremendous treat because we interviewed Meredith about it on our blog. Not sad. Time Magazine wanted to do a major photo shoot but we said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!

What could be better than a Stop. Grammar Time. voucher? A Stop. Grammar Time. class! But you can use the voucher to enrol in a class, so it all works out.

Give the gift of grammar.

— Our vouchers are e-vouchers, which means each one is a web page containing a unique voucher code.

— When you buy a voucher, we email you a link to your e-voucher. You can then send this link to your voucher recipient.

— Each voucher is redeemable for one enrolment in a one-day Stop. Grammar Time. class in Melbourne or Sydney.

Need to know more? Find our voucher FAQ below. Read more about the course, and see upcoming dates and locations, here.

What could be better than a Write Right voucher? A Write Right class! But you can use the voucher to enrol in a class, so it all works out.

— Our vouchers are e-vouchers, which means each one is a web page containing a unique voucher code.

— When you buy a voucher, we email you a link to your e-voucher. You can then send this link to your voucher recipient.

— Each voucher is redeemable for one enrolment in a Write Right class in Melbourne or Sydney.

Need to know more? Find our voucher FAQ below. Read more about the course, and see upcoming dates and locations, here.

Back in September 2016 we hosted a major copywriting event: the launch of Tait Ischia’s Copywrong to Copywriter. We were excited, that day, to be deemed ‘the most appropriate, copywriting-specific venue in town’. Thanks, Tait! We were also excited about the book, which sold out in a flash. And now, as our interminable shop renovation etches its slow progress upon this decade, we’ve finally got organised and ordered some copies for our online emporium.

What is it about? ‘Copywrong to Copywriter is a handbook for anyone who feels like they can’t write to save themselves. If you think you’ve got the wrong tone of voice, don’t understand the ins and outs of grammar or just don’t feel confident writing about yourself without sounding like an idiot, read this book.’ True.

Penned by Tait and designed by Tristan Main, with illustrations by Jacob Zinman-Jeanes, it’s a tidy little tome that we wholeheartedly endorse. Read our interview with Tait here and/or buy your copy via the button below. All checkers-out receive a bonus bookmark.

Our Stop. Grammar Time. bag is the perfect gift for the grammar aficionado in your life. That annoying bastard will love this tote! It’s also really well suited to people who like to carry things in bags. I’ll tell you what else: this bag has two handles. It is made of nice, thick cotton canvas. It is black. It is screen-printed here in Melbourne by All of the Above. And it features artwork from the amazing Tim Lahan.

What else? You get one for free if you enrol in our Stop. Grammar Time. course. But even if you do that, you’ll probably want another one to give to your mum.

Our Stop. Grammar Time. mug is the perfect gift for the grammar aficionado in your life. That annoying bastard will love this mug! It is also really well suited to left-handed people who like to drink things from ceramic vessels. If you hold it with your right hand, no one will be able to see what’s on your mug … but you will. What else do you need to know? This mug has one handle. It is black. And it features artwork by the amazing Tim Lahan.

Medward Bustinato, the man who is afraid of pencils, recommends you buy some pencils.

I just hid under my bed for a while but I’m fine now. I don’t understand why you people take the risk. There are so few occasions when you can’t avoid writing on paper. And when you’re backed into that particular corner, the dependable, industrial impersonality and stolid permanence of an ink pen is superior in every way. Pens, at very least, aren’t made of organic matter that emanates a foul sense of connection to the mouldering earth into which our corpses will be laid.

Breathe. Understanding your fear will help you conquer it, Medward. The writing tools I’ve been asked to describe are hexagonal, which diminishes their ability to roll off a table and murder your dog. One comes in green—a signifier of disease—and is stamped ‘THE GOOD COPY’. (Please note that I have no problem with The Good Copy. They are fine people with unfortunate taste in writing wares.) The other is marked ‘STAY NERVOUS’—something I have no problem doing around these icky rods—and it is painted a glossy, sepulchral black. Not good. A pink eraser is crimped onto the end with a metal ferrule, as if a tender nubbin of a baby’s still-living flesh is being used to remove your mistakes from the world.

So, fun story: since I wrote the previous paragraph I’ve been moved out of my house by some helpful policemen and now live in a facility for quote-unquote ‘people like me’. I figure I’d better wind this thing up by saying the p*ncils are available from The Good Copy’s online shop, and if I haven’t done enough to dissuade you from buying them then I guess I’ve done my job. Which is beautiful in its own way.

So this is me, Medward Bustinato, the man who is afraid of pencils, signing off by way of a large, state-sanctioned crayon with which I can’t harm myself.

The pomodoro system of time management was invented in the late 1980s by Francesco Cirillo. It is useful when you need to write something. If you wish to follow it to the letter, you must use a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. If you purchase your tomato from us, you’ll receive a 19-step ‘directions for use’ guide authored by our colleague Pork Chop. The directions will be Risograph-printed on handsome yellow paper, folded in a complicated manner and packaged with your tomato in a cardboard box. 

The tomato itself is mechanical and needs no battery. It is adjustable within a time range of one and sixty minutes. It can survive temperatures of between –10°C and +55°C, and it packs ≤0.45 N m of operating torque. To set the timer, turn clockwise to 60 before turning anticlockwise to the number of minutes required. 

The first in our semi-regular poster series is designed by a very funny man named Rob Cordiner. You may know his work from such work as Smalltime Books or Heavy Time—or our very own logo and ‘brand identity’. But aside from all that, Rob is hilarious. He came up with this one on the fly when he was working on ideas for something else.

‘What do you think of this?’ he asked Penny and Max via email. Penny’s reply was as follows: ‘I am going to Officeworks right now to print this!!’ Five minutes later, she sent a follow-up email: ‘I’m just about dying about this.’

Instead of printing it at Officeworks, we decided to get it done properly on cool, pastel-blue paper in a limited run of 50. It comes rolled up in a tube, so it will be curly when you open it but it also easily sits flat if you put some books on it or stick it up. It’s just shy of A1—594 x 840mm, to be exact. Stick it on your wall or your window, Mulder-style.

Kate Kiefer Lee and Nicole Fenton have written such a good guide to writing for the web that we’re scared to write about it on the web. But we shouldn’t be: it’s very helpful! For a preview of the order and sense contained in this book, behold its online resources.

How to write clearly, concisely and naturally is Nicely Said’s primary lesson—which, as it will tell you, is mostly about considering the reader. 

Nicole: ‘There’s a huge gap between what we learned in school and what it takes to be a web writer in practice. There are plenty of great style guides and books on writing out there, but they don’t talk about the mindset of a web writer and they don’t give you exercises to actually get down into the work. So we wanted to do that.’

Kate: ‘Companies get so focused on whatever it is they have to say that they forget to think about the people at the other end of their content. This leads to writing that’s overly formal, confusing, and cold. Thinking of your content as part of a conversation helps you communicate clearly and warms up your writing.’

Preach. If you’re looking for more gold from these authors, check out Tiny Content Framework—Nicole’s open-source project—and Voice and Tone, Kate’s guide for MailChimp.

‘Prune it out, clean it up, make the point,’ said Joan Didion. If you want to actually do that stuff, though, read this book by Helen Sword.

Helen—a professor at the University of Auckland—is the person who invented the term ‘zombie nouns’. She did so in a now-famous New York Times op-ed published in July 2012, and she’s equally thought-provoking-yet-cheerfully-succinct in this li’l gem, The Writer’s Diet.

Says the sales pitch: 

‘If your sentences are weighed down with passives and prepositions, be-verbs and waste words, The Writer’s Diet is for you—a practical, punchy introduction to good writing.’

All true. The book expands on an established editing manoeuvre called ‘the paramedic method’, but feels like the last-said, best-said. Try the diagnostic test on Helen’s website! You’ll need the book to work out what to do with your prepositions, adverbs, be-verbs and nominalisations, though. Have fun!

Wow, this book is full of good advice. It’s not organised under snippy subheadings like a LinkedIn article. It’s like having a cup o’ tea with a funny, professory sort of friend who enjoys expounding upon writing and how difficult it is. In other words, you have to actually read it, by which process it demonstrates that good writing is writing you end up reading.

Sam Leith is a British novelist, broadcaster and columnist who has clearly spent a lot of his life thinking about writing as well as doing it. Write to the Point will take you on a trip from Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals to subtweets—revealing, via trial and error, that good writing is the same in important ways. Mainly that it’s generous. But how? Put the kettle on, Sally. We’re going in.

The writer who breeds

more words than he needs

is making a chore

for the reader who reads.

—Dr Seuss

If you haunt the halls of academia, you’ll be aware that the sage advice of one Theodor Seuss Geisel is rarely heeded.

Less so the advice of Strunk and White: ‘Always use clear, precise language, even when expressing complex ideas; engage your reader’s attention through examples, illustrations, and anecdotes; avoid opaque jargon; vary your vocabulary, sentence length, and frames of reference; favour active verbs and concrete nouns; write with conviction, passion, and verve.’

Indeed, many academics write writing that stinks—or, as Helen Sword puts it in the intro to this book, ‘impersonal, stodgy, jargon-laden, abstract prose that ignores or defies most of the stylistic principles outlined above’.

Stylish Academic Writing is the answer and the cure. It’s empowering! It’s published by Harvard University Press. And, most of all, it’s the truth, Ruth.

‘I aim to start a stylistic revolution that will end in improved reading conditions for all,’ says Helen. ‘In particular, I hope to empower colleagues who have come to believe—I have heard this mantra again and again—that they are “not allowed” to write a certain way.’

If you have a thesis on the to-do list, put Stylish Academic Writing at the top of your procrastination pile.

You cannot run a shop that purports to sell writing books without stocking the most famous writing book of all: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

We tried it for eight months and, sure enough, the god of writing (Jia Tolentino) sent us a cease-and-desist letter and a signed portrait.

Not true. You know what is, though?

Begin anywhere. Scribble away, bitter & clueless. Slap together a shitty 1st draft. Take out lies & boring parts. Create a better 2nd draft.

—Anne Lamott (@annelamott), 24 July 2014

A writer, a writing teacher and a tweeter of truths, Anne Lamott lays it all out here—from starting points to short assignments to shitty first drafts to sitting down in front of your computer for decades. There’s a lot of advice for novelists but there’s also a lot of advice for everyone who writes. Some of it can be a bitter pill, but the thing is that it’s practical.

‘Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilised by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”’

Some people love The Elements of Style, believing it to be God’s guide to English grammar; some people hate The Elements of Style, wanting to burn it in a fire. Many people didn’t feel any way about it until this edition was released with Maira Kalman’s beautiful dog painting on the cover.

Whichever angle you’re coming from, welcome! This book will be a conversation starter in your life. It’s the most famous book about English grammar and style. It was spearheaded by EB White (that’s right! The Charlotte’s Web guy), first as a New Yorker article about a certain hard-nosed grammar pamphlet authored by White’s one-time Cornell University professor William Strunk Jr, and then as a book based on the article about the pamphlet.

It’s very ... confidently written—often quite baller. For instance: ‘Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.’ 

In truth, it’s partly a book about grammar and mostly a book about style. If you want to minimise the stress in your life, you shouldn’t mix those things up. Neither Strunk nor White will tell you the difference, though. So remember: just because they recommend something, doesn’t mean it’s a rule. Okay, we’re done here. Add this puppy to your cart.

William Zinsser might not have been able to play the saxophone, but no matter: he could teach people to write. He did so in person at Yale for more than 40 years; in column form (and by example) in The American Scholar; and in book form with On Writing Well, which has sold 1.5 million copies and is now in its seventh edition.

Mr Zinsser, a beloved New York character, wrote 18 other books in his lifetime, which are also very good. But On Writing Well, first published in 1976, is the one you’d find most often if you were snooping through the desks of your heroes, editorial or advertising.

It takes a four-part approach: the principles (clutter, style, audience); the methods (unity, leads and endings); the forms (interviews, memoir, business writing); and, most importantly, the attitudes. Or, as Dennis Denuto would say, ‘the vibe of the thing’.

Truth be told, don’t enrol in our Write Right course: buy this book instead. Don’t even buy it from us! We don’t care. Just buy it.

Remember:

You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for.

—William Zinsser

Oh my God. Yes, you can! Thank Lucifer for this book. Drawing on the Chicago Manual of Style’s online Q&A forum, the University of Chicago Press editorial staff brings us solutions to the most common grammatical freak-outs.

Says the sales pitch: ‘Champions of common sense, the editors offer smart, direct and occasionally tongue-in-cheek responses that have guided writers and settled arguments for more than 15 years.’

They cover curly punctuation situations, capitalisation issues, idiom misuse (is it happy medium or happy median?) and spelling (how do you write down the sound of a scream?).

But back to the titular question.

‘There is no historical or grammatical foundation for considering sentences that begin with a conjunction such as and, but or so to be in error.’
—Chicago Manual of Style

‘Has it ever been wrong to begin a sentence with and or but? No, it has not. We have been breaking this rule all the way from the ninth-century Old English Chronicle through the current day.’
—Merriam-Webster

‘But since writing is communication, clarity can only be a virtue. And although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.’
—William Strunk Jr and EB White, The Elements of Style, 1959 

 So stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

A companion to The Little Red Writing Book and The Little Black Book of Business Writing, The Little Green Grammar Book is the one we stock.

Australian poet, essayist and teacher Mark Tredinnick looks inside sentences and shows you the subjects and verbs. He is easygoing but he answers the tough questions. He makes grammar useful. He even makes it fun. We hope he doesn’t start his own grammar school.

If you want to stop sentences from working you over and get them working for you instead, this is the best place to start. And in truth, it’s not even that ‘little’! By page 218, you’ll be chuckling knowingly about the reflexive pronoun misuse in our next sentence. It will be the best Christmas present for yourself.

Mary Norris is obviously a massive legend:

She would take issue with that use of ‘massive’, though, because we do not mean that she contains a lot of mass. Mary started at The New Yorker in 1978 and worked her way up their editing hierarchy from query proofreader to page okay-er. Her book, Between You and Me: Confessions of a comma queen, is both a memoir and a meditation on editing and house style.

Mary is neither a grammar pedant nor a breezy descriptivist: she treads a middle path. ‘“Whom” may indeed be on the way out,’ she writes, ‘but so is Venice, and we still like to go there.’ She loves precision but eschews rules when the context calls for willow-bending.

Mary is trying to rile pompous over-correctors with her title. Most people think I is grander, but me is always correct after between because it’s the object of that preposition. ‘And what’s wrong with being fussy? That’s what we’re getting paid for.’

*Salutes*

If you didn’t think the Collingwood Crossword Club was cool, think again. Look at these double-sided totes we made! Classic on the front; cryptic on the back. Now everyone knows it’s hip to fill squares.

You don’t even have to be a club member to own one. But you do have to solve this cryptic clue:

DEFINITELY CARRIES BAGS (5,5)

Just kidding—you don’t have to solve the clue. We will mail you a tote in exchange for a one-time payment of AU$20.

These totes have two handles. They’re made of nice, thick cotton canvas. They’re designed by Crossword Club member Dennis Grauel, typeset in Lido STF and screen-printed here in Melbourne by Tim at Sound Merch.

If you do actually want to join Crossword Club, see our calendar for upcoming dates. We meet every month on one Sunday or another.

Behold: we have created a crossword-print headband. What would be the point of owning one, other than to look like the hippest square on your street? No point. No point at all.

Each headband is one metre long and four centimetres wide. The cotton was printed to order using water-based inks; the headbands were sewn and ironed by Collingwood Crossword Club members working late into the night; the result spoke for itself. (It was a box of crossword-print headbands.)

If you want to join Crossword Club, see our calendar for upcoming dates. We meet every month on one Sunday or another.

Filmme Fatales issue 7 is all about space: wanting space, feeling overwhelmed by space, getting lost in space and being stuck in a space you need to escape.

Created and edited by The Good Copy’s own Brodie Lancaster, Filmme Fatales issue 7 is a mix of listicles (but, like, the good kind), in-depth film analysis and short fiction, with colourful illustration and photography sprinkled throughout. You’ll read about the house in Melbourne where Dogs in Space was set, the complicated feminist film universe of James Cameron, and the literal space that a small woman called Iris Apfel occupies in our public consciousness.

Designed by Hope Lumsden-Barry, this issue is chock-full of articles that you’ll dog-ear for the tram ride home and images that you’ll want to tear out and attach to your fridge. Maybe buy a second ‘display’ copy, just to be safe.

Filmme Fatales is published by The Good Copy (and we’re bloody proud of it, by the by).

‘The language changes, and tastes change also. Language is a living thing; parts fall off or atrophy, new growths turn out to be useful and add to diversity. Some additions are ugly but stubborn (bogan, arty-farty), others are coy and euphemistic (colourful racing identity, tired and emotional, senior moment).’

So says Susan Butler—editor of the Macquarie Dictionary and writer of this book, The Aitch Factor, about being the editor of the Macquarie Dictionary.

But language change also pisses people off. Poor Susan is often treated as an adjudicator of word arguments (is it really aitch or haitch? Should anyone be allowed to use impact as a verb? Why is man boobs even in the dictionary?) when her true role is to document Australian English.

And document it she does, like a flat-out legend. Look at this video of her TED Talk at the Opera House:

Susan is surprisingly zen about pedants who hate myriad as a noun, for instance, or who feel that she should be more decisive about whether a scallop is a potato cake or a marine bivalve mollusc of the family Pectinidae. ‘We should have greater tolerance of the choices made by others.’ What a smart, friendly person she is.

Harvard’s Steven Pinker is a psycholinguist, a mop-haired orator, a thinker of thoughts about language. He loves grammar; he loves style; he knows they’re different things. This book is a bitter pill for people who want the road to good writing to be paved with rules:

‘Although some of the rules can make prose better, many of them make it worse, and writers are better off flouting them. The rules often mash together issues of grammatical correctness, logical coherence, formal style, and standard dialect, but a skilled writer needs to keep them straight. And the orthodox stylebooks are ill equipped to deal with an inescapable fact about language: it changes over time. Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.’

Getting your message across, earning trust, adding beauty to the world—that’s style, says Pinker. ‘This thoroughly impractical virtue of good writing is where the practical effort of mastering good writing must begin.’

If you freaked out reading that New York Times article about how the full stop is on its way out, you might just love this book. Shady Characters is Keith Houston’s history of punctuation—from ancient Roman graffiti to the internet.

On some level, we should all know more about the @, the & and the * (we offer the following Guardian correction note as proof: ‘This article has been corrected. The original had “asterix” for “asterisk”.’ Haha! Get it together, Guardian), and Houston’s book is both info-packed and entertaining.

Overall, it’s a real head-check about how much punctuation has changed since humans began writing words. Houston covers the hyphen, the dashes (en and em), quotation marks (single and double), the pilcrow (¶), the interrobang (‽), the octothorpe (#), the manicule (☞, ☜), the dagger (†), the prodigal @ and more. 

It’s f*&^%¶# great!

This is a biography of William Maxwell Evarts Perkins—aka Max Perkins, aka ‘editor of genius’—written by A Scott Berg. Max Perkins is the most famous literary editor ever, and he wore a hat almost all the time. He edited Fitzgerald, Wolfe and Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea was dedicated to Max after he died in 1947) and discovered many other writers, including James Jones, Marjorie Yawlings and JP Marquand.

Comments by staff reviewer Meredith Forrester:

My favourite bit is on page 18, where Berg writes about how Perkins wouldn’t let the manuscript of This Side of Paradise out of his sight because it was his first project as an editor at Scribners and he’d fought very hard to get Fitzgerald on the books; ergo, hundreds of mistakes in the first print run because no proofreaders, and then a ‘witty’ guy from the New York Tribune made a game out of spotting them. Poor Max! Another favourite part is finding out about Max’s wife, Louise, in whose brain Max ‘foresaw and welcomed a lifelong battle of wits’. 

This book lives in my backpack because a) Rory Gilmore always carried a book in her backpack and b) I like knowing that Max is nearby whenever I need to kick some poorly written arse. It’s the best present for anyone who loves editing and literature and history and reading books that use unspaced em dashes.

David Marsh is the Guardian’s recently retired production editor and the former keeper of its common-sense style guide. He used to run the @guardianstyle Twitter account, too, and would smack people down with his grammar and style sass. His book For Who the Bell Tolls—probably named for this 2011 Guardian op-ed on who versus whom—is for sale here in our shop. It’s a great read if you’re interested in plain English and want to learn from David’s experiences writing for newspapers. Some people have called him harsh, but David Marsh is a wise and wonderful writer.

Right now, pedants are prowling the internet, passing out wolf tickets for grammar crimes. Hating on new words, poo-pooing new uses for old ones. But what are they enforcing, really? Conventions that are being superseded.

‘English,’ says Oliver Kamm, author of this book and an editor at the Times of London, ‘reflects what its users say and write rather than arbitrary judgments of correctness.’ The pedants mistake linguistic change for impoverishment. They spout folklorish superstitions while fossilising themselves in the era when among was amongst and that was that.

Is Mr Kamm too permissive? Maybe, says The Guardian. But his book’s historical tour of grammar and style proves (as the publisher’s sales pitch promises) that ‘many of the purists

’ prohibitions are bogus and can be cheerfully disregarded’.

If you desire a once-and-for-all explanation (or even just some context) for those ‘grammar rules’ you keep hearing, this book will boost your confidence and arm you with retorts. If you are the one who spouts the rules, heed James Shapiro, professor of English at Columbia University: ‘Pedants are going to hate this book—and quietly take its lessons to heart.’

The first thing you should know about this book is that it’s available online for free as a PDF download. It’s the CIA’s style manual, eighth edition, de-classified in 2012, known formally as the Directorate of Intelligence Style Manual and Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications. We were at Officeworks one day and decided to print it out on pink paper and pay for some classy red binding. That’s all you’re really shelling out for here. You should also know that the font size came out quite small but that’s just the excuse you need to whip out the ol’ magnifying glass—right, Harriet the Spy?

Want to know how to capitalise the Free World, the Contras and the Group of Eight? What about that series of tactical ballistic missiles developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War? (Use Scud, not SCUD.) Want some good old-fashioned style decisions on the serial comma, the colon, indefinite articles with consonants and vowels, and the avoidance of apostrophes in plurals (Boeing 747s, MiGs, the 1980s)? It has that stuff as well!*

*Because intelligence reports are expected to be dispassionate, this punctuation mark should rarely, if ever, be used.

This t-shirt features a portrait of Penny Modra accompanied by the words ‘stay nervous’.

Part of what makes Penny such a great writer and editor is how she applies the same intense focus and anxiety to everything she does. Regardless of whether it’s an Instagram post, a petty cash receipt or a feature for The Guardian, Penny gives it her all. ‘Stay nervous’ is her slightly fatalistic way of explaining this approach. It’s a reminder that something could go wrong at any time.

Joanna Anderson is the artist whose illustration graces this t-shirt. We approached Joanna for the job because we like her work. Lucky she agreed to do it; otherwise we would’ve had to draw it ourselves. That wouldn’t have looked so good.

This is a heavyweight cotton t-shirt. The sizes are standard adult men’s, and they run true to size.

This tote features a portrait of Penny Modra accompanied by the words ‘stay nervous’.

Part of what makes Penny such a great writer and editor is how she applies the same intense focus and anxiety to everything she does. Regardless of whether it’s an Instagram post, a petty cash receipt or a feature for The Guardian, Penny gives it her all. ‘Stay nervous’ is her slightly fatalistic way of explaining this approach. It’s a reminder that something could go wrong at any time.

Joanna Anderson is the artist whose illustration graces this tote. We approached Joanna for the job because we like her work. Lucky she agreed to do it; otherwise we would’ve had to draw it ourselves. That wouldn’t have looked so good.

These totes are well-suited to people who like to carry things in bags. I'll tell you what else: they have two handles each. They are made of nice, thick white cotton canvas and are screen-printed here in Melbourne by All of the Above.

The specs: Genuine ceramic mug. White with a blue print. Two holes only (top and handle). Perfect size (large). Office style. Lovingly machine-made. The print faces out when you hold the mug in your right hand, which is great for lefties who like to do two things at once. Illustration by Tim Lahan. Design by Smalltime Projects.

Comments by staff reviewer Max Olijnyk: 

I think the things you touch and look at every day should give you good vibes. Take mugs, for instance. Sure, your mug works just fine, but every time you pick it up you think, Yep, here’s that boring mug. Here we go again. What’s the point? Our mugs break that grim cycle. Alabaster white, Lumbergh chic, thin-rimmed for optimum mouth feel, emblazoned with a whacky Tim Lahan illustration reminding you to ‘keep it together’ … it’s a good vibe.

Hold your torso together with this remarkable garment.

This t-shirt is manufactured from pure cotton by the good folk at AS Colour. Next, it is shipped to Australia and kept in storage. Then, we purchase it in bulk. The next few steps are complicated: We supply computer-generated designs of Tim Lahan’s artwork to the screen printers. Following a protracted period of negotiations and changes (we’re pretty indecisive), the artwork meets the t-shirt by way of ink, squeegee and silk. Then, it dries. Then, it’s pressed. Then (we can’t be bothered coming up with another way of saying ‘then’), the screen printers email or text to let us know that our order is ready. All that remains to be done is for us to borrow Mel’s car, drive to the screen printers, park in a No Standing zone, walk in and chat for a while, and then pack the boxes into the car, drive back to work, count all the t-shirts, put little size tags on them, take some photos of them, upload the photos, write this, publish it, and then kick back and listen to some tunes. Maybe get a sandwich.

Anyway, it’s a great-looking t-shirt. Standard adult men’s sizes, true to size. Chest pocket and back print.

Hold your torso together with this remarkable garment.

This t-shirt is manufactured from pure cotton by the good folk at AS Colour. Next, it is shipped to Australia and kept in storage. Then, we purchase it in bulk. The next few steps are complicated: We supply computer-generated designs of Tim Lahan’s artwork to the screen printers. Following a protracted period of negotiations and changes (we’re pretty indecisive), the artwork meets the t-shirt by way of ink, squeegee and silk. Then, it dries. Then, it’s pressed. Then (we can’t be bothered coming up with another way of saying ‘then’), the screen printers email or text to let us know that our order is ready. All that remains to be done is for us to borrow Mel’s car, drive to the screen printers, park in a No Standing zone, walk in and chat for a while, and then pack the boxes into the car, drive back to work, count all the t-shirts, put little size tags on them, take some photos of them, upload the photos, write this, publish it, and then kick back and listen to some tunes. Maybe get a sandwich.

Anyway, it’s a great-looking t-shirt. Standard adult men’s sizes, true to size. Chest pocket and back print.

This is a cotton crewneck jumper with raglan sleeves. Raglan is a great word, we think. This jumper (or sweater, or windcheater—whatever you prefer to call it) has a print on the front of it. The artwork is by a fellow named Tim Lahan, an artist from America. We really like his work. ‘Hold it together’ is a bit of a catch-cry for us here at The Good Copy. The vibe is that you acknowledge that things get a bit desperate sometimes, especially if you expose yourself to the challenges and pressures of life. And acknowledging that things are hard—that what you do is difficult—is empowering. Holding it together and keeping on going is the only way forward. At least we think that’s what it’s about.

The jumper is made by AS Colour. It comes in standard adult men’s sizes that run true to size. If you don’t sweat too much, grey is a great choice.

This is a cotton crewneck jumper with raglan sleeves. Raglan is a great word, we think. This jumper (or sweater, or windcheater—whatever you prefer to call it) has a print on the front of it. The artwork is by a fellow named Tim Lahan, an artist from America. We really like his work. ‘Hold it together’ is a bit of a catch-cry for us here at The Good Copy. The vibe is that you acknowledge that things get a bit desperate sometimes, especially if you expose yourself to the challenges and pressures of life. And acknowledging that things are hard—that what you do is difficult—is empowering. Holding it together and keeping on going is the only way forward. At least we think that’s what it’s about.

The jumper is made by AS Colour. It comes in standard adult men’s sizes that run true to size.

We, The Good Copy, want to light a fire under your bum. Actually, we’d only like to provide a small flame for you to position near the place you do your writing. But we hope the effect will be the same.

Our 10,000-word candle will burn for 50 hours. If you can write 200 words per hour, you’ll finish your dissertation, novella or screenplay at the exact moment you reach the end of your wick.

With its natural Australian bush aroma, your new candle will also cut through the toxic miasma of self-doubt, boredom and confusion that hangs low in the air around your desk. It’s made of various things collected from the bush by the legitimate hippies who work at The Candle Library in Byron Bay. These are combined with 100% soy wax and poured into a dark blue smoked-glass vessel.

Burnable only at one end, this candle promotes work–life balance. Use it yourself or give it to the writer in your life. The one you want to fire up. Sorry, we’ve got 10,000 of these gags.

You get the idea, though: it’s a candle that helps you write.

Benjamin Dreyer uses Oxford commas in all lists of three or more items. But he’s so funny and smart that we love him anyway. He cares about language and people; he’s extremely on Twitter; his dog is adorable; he’s a celebrity editor for our times.

Specifically, Benjamin is executive managing editor and copy chief at Random House. He’s been doing English for a long time, and he has *opinions*.

This book is partly memoir. ‘WRITE YOUR OWN FUCKING BOOK’ was the margin note he got back from one author whose work he hoped to improve. Oh look, he has.

And partly style manual. An idiosyncratic, tendentious style manual compiled across 30 years on the job. Benjamin admits that many of his style decisions are ‘peeves and crotchets’, which he corrals in a chapter in the book’s listicled second half, handily named ‘The stuff in the back’.

Some of the decisions he covers: using ‘literally’ figuratively, modifying superlatives (‘very unique’—just don’t) and the correct use of colons. Parallelism, a rule ‘direly easy’ to fall afoul of, begets this example:

Preach. Dreyer is often slyly political, and not above snarking about the correct use of ‘unprecedented’ apropos The Donald’s ‘unpresidented’. 

Be warned, however, that he’s almost prejudicially American. For instance, he claims that ‘manoeuvre’, the British spelling of ‘maneuver’, puts him in mind of ‘a cat coughing up a hairball’.

Maybe he has a point.

PAPERBACK

‘The Associated Press Stylebook finally came around on the lowercase internet (and web) front in 2016, but nothing looks as good as smug feels, so never forget that BuzzFeed did it first, way back in 2012.’
—Emmy J Favilla

Another thing BuzzFeed did first, in 2014: create a comprehensive, publicly available style guide for using English post-internet. A potted selection from the ‘s’ section of its word list:

screenshot (OK as n. and v.; screenshot as past tense and past participle)
shippers (when referring to fans who yearn for a fictional couple’s romance); ship, shipping (v.)
shit talk (n.); shit-talk (v.)
surfbort

Emmy J Favilla wrote the original BuzzFeed Style Guide. She’s basically the web’s copy chief. Her book is packed with explorations, digressions and implications drawn from that impossible project. It’s full of screenshots of Emmy and the other BuzzFeed editors working things out in real time—plus quizzes, and online surveys on language use.

It can teach you ‘how not to be a jerk’ (by choosing inclusive language). And it makes you really think about style and usage. Do you agree with Emmy and team? How would you punctuate around tildes used for ~whimsical~ emphasis? Should it be ‘weenus’ or ‘weenis’? Do you prefer ‘I screenshot the meme’ or ‘I screenshotted the meme’? Which is better for the reader? Making decisions when you’re shooting for the moving target of internet English takes empathy, courage and fortitude. This book is a report from the frontline.

But what about ‘whom’? you ask. Nope, Emmy says—and she’s not alone. Evidence that language is alive and computers are afoot.

If this book turns you into an obsessive style-thinker, sign up for the excellent Quibbles & Bits:  an e-newsletter from BuzzFeed’s US style team. And don’t forget that BuzzFeed Australia has its own style guide, which thinks deeply about Australian English—from asylum-seeker to boofhead to deadly to Indigenous, to g’day to goon bag (two words).

 

‘Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before.’
—Gretchen McCulloch

Amen 🙏. Newsflash: texting and social media is making us more, not less, linguistically sophisticated. Also, it’s not turning (young) people into grammar-free, punctuation-allergic zombies. Applying standard tests for literacy and formal writing, Full Internet People do just as well as those from older generations. That’s according to research Gretchen McCulloch draws on in her cool book Because Internet.

Gretchen is the expert on this stuff; she’s the resident linguist at WIRED magazine and co-creator of the Lingthusiasm podcast. Her book, a New York Times bestseller, looks at many of the ways people writing online have found to convey nuance, tone of voice and what McCulloch calls ‘digital embodiment’. ALL CAPS, worddd lengthennning, artfully edited word smashes, ~irony tildes~ and ~*~*~sparkle enthusiasm~*~*~ are all present and correct. Emoji and memes each get their own chapter.

One of the interesting themes of the book is Gretchen’s knack for finding historical precedents for internet trends: Renaissance emoji, the post-WWII acronym fad. People been fuxing with language forever.

If you have a grumpy grandparent who loves to generalise about your generation or a bewildering grandchild who thinks your text messages are rude, then boot up the Google machine and order this book.

 

‘Yesterday Mr. Hall wrote that the printer’s proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me, & I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.’
—Mark Twain, 1889

Lol Mark. Such intense feelings about punctuation haven’t gone away; apostrophury and lamentations over failings of hyphen sense break out in the media with numbing regularity.

To understand how we got here, you need to read David Crystal’s fascinating, and weirdly calming, dive into the history and use of punctuation.

Prof. Crystal is a world-renowned authority on linguistics and has written or edited something like 120 books. He’s also a real nice writer; Making a Point is not only packed with fascinating examples and funny digressions but is also a pleasure to read. Unlike this:

manysurvivingexamplesofoldenglishcontainnocapitallettersnospacesandnofullstopsorpunctuationofanykind

As he explains, medieval scribes started to add punctuation to aid reading and mark pauses, in a simulation of speech. Various formulas would emerge: a full stop is a pause worth four commas, for example.

Only later would grammarians impose a semantic approach, which sought to systematise for meaning.

It’s in the tension between these two approaches, according to David, ‘where we see the origins of virtually all the arguments over punctuation that have continued down the centuries and which are still with us today’.

Crystal’s social and historical approach is useful (again, calming) if we’re to ever get away from the hopeless idea that there is such a thing as a singular, correct English grammar. Ultimately, he offers a ‘pragmatic’ approach to punctuation. In his gentle way (he sometimes comes across like a cool, patient grandparent) he offers an alternative to the Lynne Trusses of this world: ‘It is not possible to be zero tolerant about a linguistic system that contains so much uncertainty’, he says.

Please note: The American edition spells ‘pernickety’ with an ’s’: ‘persnickety’.

 

Some people think grammar is dying. David Crystal explains why that's a misguided notion. He recalls his daughter making her first sentences. She discovers nouns, then verbs; she finds ‘and’; she adds a predicate to a subject.

Grammar: it’s baked in, not brushed on! Wait, what even is grammar? It’s how we put words together (and inflected inflects inflook inflect them) to make meaning in a language.

David knows. He’s a superstar linguist and historian of the English language, and he has written or edited around 120 books. This one is part of a series he began with The Story of English in 100 Words and has continued with Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling, and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling, Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation and Sounds Appealing: The Passionate Story of English Pronunciation.

A book by Prof. Crystal is always as fun as it is instructive. His simple conceit of following his daughter’s language acquisition allows him to take the reader through grammar one step at a time. He goes on to explain grammatical terms and how they’re used and have been used. He looks at the history of grammar and grammarians, taking it to the meta-level of the study and teaching of his subject (including how it’s often taught badly or not at all, and how he suggests we might remedy this). In other words, through 29 brief and punchy chapters—many followed by a tangential ‘interlude’—he breaks things down before building them back up in a way that will genuinely make you feel better.

 

Early one morning in 1837, two University of Paris law professors met to fight a duel. Over how to correctly use the semicolon.

It’s always been a contentious little glyph.

Historian and philosopher of science Cecelia Watson has written a dazzling ‘biography’ of the semicolon, from its invention by a Venetian publisher and printer in 1494 to its role in certain twentieth-century legal decisions; for want of a semicolon, one defendant in a 1927 New Jersey murder trial was sentenced to death while the other got life, for the same crime.

When Renaissance nerd Aldus Manutius created this odd new mark, he intended it as rhythmic, musical; it was meant to indicate a pause longer than a comma and shorter than a colon. That’s not a system, though, and eventually grammarians came along to ‘create a market for their rules’.

Those rules, as they stand: semicolons separate, but also link, independent clauses; they act as a ‘super comma’ in complex lists. Mary Norris explains this better in her review of Cecelia’s book; she also points out that if you’re looking only for rules, this isn’t the book for you.

It’s a book to free your mind! Should punctuation serve syntax alone? What about rhythm? Why is everyone so bossy?

Watson delivers one David Foster Wallace a beatdown on the racial politics of enforcing standard English; she examines the eccentric, expressive power of semicolons in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (clue in title); she celebrates how the springy little bastards work in Trainspotting (‘The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling’).

There’s more, so much more, in this tightly coiled book; by the way, we’re selling the handsome US hardback version with cover design by Sara Ridky.

 

Bumbershoot! Americans are so in love with the imagined silliness of British English that they’ve been making up words they claim are from Old Blighty, such as this early twentieth-century synonym for umbrella. 

Here’s one that’s even more mind-blowing: When you think of American English (AmE) versus British English (BrE) you might think of -ise and -ize word endings. But the freaking OED promotes the so-called American -ize ending, as ‘Oxford spelling’. In fact, -ize was common in the UK as late as the 1990s, when The Times and Cambridge University Press ‘suddenly switched allegiance to -ise after preferring -ize for the seventy years prior’.

Just a couple of fascinating facts from The Prodigal Tongue. Its author, Lynne Murphy, is an American linguistics professor who’s lived in England since 2000. Her investigation of the sibling rivalry between the world’s two dominant Englishes is hilarious and shows a love of spoken language, but it’s also rooted in facts and data.

Lynne is very online. On her Twitter you can find #DotD, or US/UK Difference of the Day, while on her blog, Separated by a Common Language, she uses analytics to wade deep into usage.

The book’s website is the most fun, though. You can do quizzes to see how fluently you speak AmE or BrE, or link to excerpts so you can decide if this is the book for you. It should be, though: it’s not only the bollocks but also the straight dope.

 

Copy editing is the second most enjoyable thing you can do on your own.

And you’re not even really alone! You have style guides.

Carry your friends with you in this royal blue cotton tote, whose sturdy construction contends even with the 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.

Like our other models, this tote has two handles. Unlike our other models, it doesn’t have a gusset. It was designed by Stuart Geddes, who used a font called Staunch, which was created by Vincent Chan. Vincent’s studio is Matter of Sorts. It was screen printed—in Collingwood, home of The Good Copy—by While You Sleep.

Product blurb style quiz:

1. Would the Chicago have advised us to use the closed compound ‘copyeditor’?
2. Does the Associated Press Stylebook prefer ‘screen printed’ or ‘screenprinted’?
3. True or false: The final paragraph contains one restrictive and one non-restrictive relative clause?
4. Would the Chicago approve of ‘royal blue’ un-hyphenated in the attributive position?
5. Would Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage allow the inanimate ‘whose’?
6. Would Australia’s Style Manual: For Authors, Editors and Printers (sixth edition) approve of the closed ems?
7. Which of these questions isn’t really about style?

For the answers, email hello@thegoodcopy.com.au with the subject line ’I am tote-ally right’. No prizes available. 

Our friend the designer, historian and academic Warren ‘The Boss’ Taylor found an old Scholastic Magazines poster of ‘grammatical bloopers’ on eBay and made us buy it. He said we should pay homage to it with our own poster and a new set of bloopers. So, we did.

Our version is both more ‘adult’ and more juvenile than that original piece of educational ephemera from 1974. It draws shamelessly on classics from the internet, including ambiguous pronouns causing confusion about dogs pooping, apostrophe catastrophes that make it seem like people want to eat dicks and jokes about missing Oxford commas. (Look, we just did another one!)

So, it’s pedagogical and all that, but it’s also good for the toilet door.

Warren set us up with designer and illustrator Zach Beltsos-Russo, who applied his extensive talents and channelled the spirit of whimsical-yet-disturbing late-twentieth-century classroom materials.

The poster measures 350mm x 500mm and is a two-colour offset print in very 70s peach and purple, with a stippled background and a candy-stripe border. It was made in Melbourne in an edition of 300.

Featuring plenty of dangling modifiers, you’ll love it!

Note: this is a folded version of the poster and will be posted in a flat envelope. For an unfolded version, rolled and mailed in a tube, click here. (Postage is more expensive for the rolled version.) 

Our friend the designer, historian and academic Warren ‘The Boss’ Taylor found an old Scholastic Magazines poster of ‘grammatical bloopers’ on eBay and made us buy it. He said we should pay homage to it with our own poster and a new set of bloopers. So, we did.

Our version is both more ‘adult’ and more juvenile than that original piece of educational ephemera from 1974. It draws shamelessly on classics from the internet, including ambiguous pronouns causing confusion about dogs pooping, apostrophe catastrophes that make it seem like people want to eat dicks and jokes about missing Oxford commas. (Look, we just did another one!)

So, it’s pedagogical and all that, but it’s also good for the toilet door.

Warren set us up with designer and illustrator Zach Beltsos-Russo, who applied his extensive talents and channelled the spirit of whimsical-yet-disturbing late-twentieth-century classroom materials.

The poster measures 350mm x 500mm and is a two-colour offset print in very 70s peach and purple, with a stippled background and a candy-stripe border. It was made in Melbourne in an edition of 300.

Featuring plenty of dangling modifiers, you’ll love it!

Note: this is an unfolded version of the poster, which will be rolled and mailed in a packing tube. For a folded version posted in a flat envelope, click here. (Postage is cheaper for the folded version.)