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The Grammar Bible: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Grammar but Didn't Know Whom to Ask
A comprehensive, practical reference guide to the idiosyncrasies of the English language
No one knows grammar like Michael Strumpf. For over a quarter of a century, as creator and proprietor of the National Grammar Hot Line, he helped thousands of callers from every corner of the globe tackle the thorniest issues of English grammar. Now, in The Grammar Bible , he has created an eminently useful guide to better speaking and writing.
Unlike other grammar manuals, The Grammar Bible is driven by the actual questions Professor Strumpf encountered during his years of teaching and fielding phone calls from anxious writers, conscientious students, and perplexed editors, including such perennial quandaries as
o Where do I put this comma?
o What case should this pronoun be in?
o How do I form the possessive of Dickens?
Professor Strumpf explains these and other language issues with wit and wisdom, showing how to speak more clearly and write more impressively by avoiding common errors and following the principles of good grammar. Whether you need a comprehensive review of the subjunctive mood or simply want to know which form of a verb to use, The Grammar Bible is a practical guide that will enlighten, educate, and entertain.
No one knows grammar like Michael Strumpf. For over a quarter of a century, as creator and proprietor of the National Grammar Hot Line, he helped thousands of callers from every corner of the globe tackle the thorniest issues of English grammar. Now, in The Grammar Bible , he has created an eminently useful guide to better speaking and writing.
Unlike other grammar manuals, The Grammar Bible is driven by the actual questions Professor Strumpf encountered during his years of teaching and fielding phone calls from anxious writers, conscientious students, and perplexed editors, including such perennial quandaries as
o Where do I put this comma?
o What case should this pronoun be in?
o How do I form the possessive of Dickens?
Professor Strumpf explains these and other language issues with wit and wisdom, showing how to speak more clearly and write more impressively by avoiding common errors and following the principles of good grammar. Whether you need a comprehensive review of the subjunctive mood or simply want to know which form of a verb to use, The Grammar Bible is a practical guide that will enlighten, educate, and entertain.
512 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
February 24, 2023
When I created a Goodreads account, I was worried that my current reading project (mostly classic novels and style guides) would inflate my average rating to the neighborhood of 5.0, causing me to look like an idiot. Thanks to The Grammar Bible, this does not appear as if it's going to be a problem, at least for now.
I appreciated certain aspects of the book, and I'm cognizant of the fact that writing a full grammar explainer, with examples, in fewer than 500 pages, is a difficult thing to do. After reading it, I do feel more comfortable with grammatical terms and certain areas of usage—one should use "between" when poker chips are split between two winners, and "among" when poker chips are split among more than two winners—so I'm giving it three stars (would be three-and-a-half if I had the option).
Two problems with the book knocked off a star each. The first has to do with the order in which Strumpf taught grammatical components. The book goes from small to large, with nouns, plurals, etc. at the beginning, and prepositional phrases, relative clauses, etc. coming later. However, certain terms which are taught only in the second half of the book, come up often in the first half ("predicate," to name one I noticed repeatedly). I found this to be needlessly confusing. Furthermore, certain second-half concepts, like nominal clauses, feel so commonplace after one reads first-half examples which include but don't explicitly name them, that it becomes difficult to identify these second-half concepts later, as they no longer feel pointed.
The book loses a second star for two pieces of truly horrible creative writing advice. In fairness, creative writing was not Strumpf's focus, but the advice is so bad that it's unforgivable regardless. First, when discussing comma splices, he takes an example from someone's short story that uses one in the following sentence: "The safe is empty, the butler is missing." This is on page 275, which I know because I was so annoyed that I wrote it down. The splice in the aforementioned sentence is clearly effective, obviously better than Strumpf's ideas (semicolon, separate sentences, adding a conjunction), and works well to establish the kind of pace and drama that any theft/burglary story would want. "The safe is empty, the butler is missing." It speeds along in a very pleasurable way. Splices like the example above are so clearly productive, that even the strict guidelines of The Elements of Style *encourage* them in situations where both main clauses are short and parallel in form.
Later in the book (page 394), Strumpf gives advice to creative writers who want up their dialogue with speech tags other than "said," a word he thinks is "so dull." Of course, any creative writing teacher will tell you that the dullness of "said" is exactly the point; readers skimming over the word is precisely what makes it so effective. A story is much worse off when readers have to pay attention to dumb, flamboyant speech tags such as "recapitulated," "trumpeted," and "jested" (alternatives he actually, truly offers), and can't focus on the tone and rhythm of the dialogue itself, which should internally indicate the way it's being spoken.
Anyway, I'm happy to know which kinds of subordinate clauses require commas.
I appreciated certain aspects of the book, and I'm cognizant of the fact that writing a full grammar explainer, with examples, in fewer than 500 pages, is a difficult thing to do. After reading it, I do feel more comfortable with grammatical terms and certain areas of usage—one should use "between" when poker chips are split between two winners, and "among" when poker chips are split among more than two winners—so I'm giving it three stars (would be three-and-a-half if I had the option).
Two problems with the book knocked off a star each. The first has to do with the order in which Strumpf taught grammatical components. The book goes from small to large, with nouns, plurals, etc. at the beginning, and prepositional phrases, relative clauses, etc. coming later. However, certain terms which are taught only in the second half of the book, come up often in the first half ("predicate," to name one I noticed repeatedly). I found this to be needlessly confusing. Furthermore, certain second-half concepts, like nominal clauses, feel so commonplace after one reads first-half examples which include but don't explicitly name them, that it becomes difficult to identify these second-half concepts later, as they no longer feel pointed.
The book loses a second star for two pieces of truly horrible creative writing advice. In fairness, creative writing was not Strumpf's focus, but the advice is so bad that it's unforgivable regardless. First, when discussing comma splices, he takes an example from someone's short story that uses one in the following sentence: "The safe is empty, the butler is missing." This is on page 275, which I know because I was so annoyed that I wrote it down. The splice in the aforementioned sentence is clearly effective, obviously better than Strumpf's ideas (semicolon, separate sentences, adding a conjunction), and works well to establish the kind of pace and drama that any theft/burglary story would want. "The safe is empty, the butler is missing." It speeds along in a very pleasurable way. Splices like the example above are so clearly productive, that even the strict guidelines of The Elements of Style *encourage* them in situations where both main clauses are short and parallel in form.
Later in the book (page 394), Strumpf gives advice to creative writers who want up their dialogue with speech tags other than "said," a word he thinks is "so dull." Of course, any creative writing teacher will tell you that the dullness of "said" is exactly the point; readers skimming over the word is precisely what makes it so effective. A story is much worse off when readers have to pay attention to dumb, flamboyant speech tags such as "recapitulated," "trumpeted," and "jested" (alternatives he actually, truly offers), and can't focus on the tone and rhythm of the dialogue itself, which should internally indicate the way it's being spoken.
Anyway, I'm happy to know which kinds of subordinate clauses require commas.
January 30, 2019
This is a useful book for anyone who wants to brush up on their grammar skills. I wasn't interested in the terminology and found myself skimming a lot of it. I favored the sections that listed examples of usage as well as those sections that addressed questions that had been called in to the Hot Line. I was pleased to learn that I already knew a lot about grammar previously; having said that, I also took a few pages of notes. This book satisfied all of my questions and I now feel more confident in my ability to write (although it will take a while and plenty of practice to truly absorb all of the information). Two thumbs up.
October 3, 2025
Language, that eternal playground of human imagination, has always hovered uneasily between the cage and the carnival. On the one hand, grammar promises to pin down our sentences like specimens under glass: neat, categorized, and supposedly correct.
On the other hand, words leak out of their cages, dance between meanings, evolve in the wild, mock the supposed authority of grammar itself. Into this tension strolls The Grammar Bible by Michael Strumpf and Auriel Douglas, a book that, by virtue of its title, announces itself with a swagger of absolutism—“Bible,” after all, the last word in doctrinal authority—and yet, once read closely, betrays the postmodern paradox it tries so hard to conceal.
For in trying to be a final reference, a “Bible,” it simultaneously reveals that grammar is never final, never fixed, but endlessly shifting, endlessly misused, endlessly contested. It is a book that is most illuminating when it fails to control language, for its failures shine a light on the instability of linguistic authority.
Consider the subtitle: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Grammar but Didn’t Know Whom to Ask. Already, we are caught in a grammatical paradox. The word “whom” is both pedantically precise and socially archaic. It is a word that the authors themselves would defend as correct usage, while most speakers of English long ago consigned it to the attic of linguistic curiosities, dusted off only by lawyers and grammarians.
The subtitle, therefore, is both a joke and a provocation: it appeals to those who want to be right while gesturing toward the anxiety that “right” is a shifting category. Who asks “whom” anymore? Who cares? And yet the book insists there is a world of readers who both do and don’t care, caught between the democratic looseness of language as it is spoken and the authoritarian strictures of grammar as it is taught. This paradox is the real subject of the book, whether or not the authors acknowledge it.
The project of The Grammar Bible is, at first glance, straightforward. It sets out to explain grammar systematically to readers bewildered by the rules. It is organized as one might expect of a reference book: nouns, verbs, participles, clauses, punctuation, all laid out with examples and witty commentary. Strumpf and Douglas attempt to balance clarity with accessibility, answering the sorts of questions people are too embarrassed to ask. Why is it “he and I” rather than “him and me”? Why does a dangling participle sound awkward? What is the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses? The tone is both friendly and pedagogical, and for many readers the book may indeed serve as a much-needed lifeline in the quicksand of grammatical uncertainty. Yet what is striking is not the content itself—which, after all, can be found in a hundred other grammar handbooks—but the way the book reveals grammar as a deeply cultural performance, a stage upon which anxieties about class, correctness, and legitimacy play themselves out.
Postmodern theory has long dismantled the idea of language as transparent or stable. Derrida, Barthes, Kristeva, and countless others remind us that meaning slides, that every signifier is haunted by its instability, that rules are only temporary gestures toward order. In this sense, The Grammar Bible becomes a deeply ironic artifact: it wants to freeze the flow of language, but in doing so it inadvertently dramatizes the impossibility of its own mission. To speak of “rules” of English is to ignore that those rules are constantly contested, enforced unevenly across social strata, and subject to evolution.
Consider the example of the split infinitive, that endlessly debated construction immortalized by Star Trek’s “to boldly go.” Prescriptive grammarians have long frowned upon it, citing rules imported from Latin. Descriptive linguists point out that English is not Latin and that actual speakers split infinitives all the time without confusion. The Grammar Bible tries to strike a compromise, noting the controversy while gently leaning toward permissiveness. But what does this reveal? That grammar is less about clarity of meaning than about social authority. To split or not to split becomes less a question of intelligibility and more a question of which linguistic tribe one belongs to: the guardians of tradition or the anarchists of usage.
The postmodern critic will notice that in these very moments of prescriptive hesitation, The Grammar Bible reveals its cultural politics. Grammar is never just grammar—it is a discourse of power. The authors’ invocation of the “Bible” suggests both the sacredness of linguistic correctness and the impossibility of total adherence. Just as the religious Bible contains contradictions and demands interpretation, so too does the grammar Bible. Its rules are proclaimed with certainty, but its margins are filled with exceptions, caveats, compromises. This instability is precisely what postmodernism celebrates: the recognition that authority is provisional, that systems are self-contradictory, that the supposed solidity of grammar is undermined by the slipperiness of usage.
Reading Strumpf and Douglas, one cannot help but recall Foucault’s observations about discourse and discipline. Grammar is a technology of control, a way of shaping subjects. To know grammar is to demonstrate membership in a literate elite, to wield authority in bureaucratic, academic, or legal settings. To misuse grammar is to risk dismissal, mockery, even exclusion. The authors of The Grammar Bible are aware of this to some extent, and they write with a populist friendliness that tries to include rather than exclude. Yet the very act of creating a “Bible” of grammar reinforces the idea that there is one true path, one sanctioned authority. The postmodern reader recognizes this as both impossible and revealing: grammar is never neutral, and every attempt to canonize it is an exercise of cultural power.
What makes the book fascinating, then, is not merely its content but its contradictions. It encourages readers to take comfort in rules, yet the examples it provides often betray the unruliness of English. It insists on clarity while acknowledging that clarity itself is subjective, dependent on context. It praises correctness while hinting at the absurdity of some rules. Take, for instance, the old injunction against ending a sentence with a preposition. The authors explain the rule but also acknowledge its artificiality. And in doing so, they echo the postmodern idea that rules are less eternal truths than inherited fictions, myths passed down to maintain a certain order. To enforce them blindly is to ignore the vibrant life of language, its resistance to rigidity.
There is also something deliciously ironic in the fact that a book about grammar must itself be written in prose that is both correct and inviting. Strumpf and Douglas succeed admirably in this regard, crafting sentences that are precise without being pedantic, lively without sacrificing clarity. Yet even here the postmodern reader cannot help but notice that the very act of demonstrating grammatical perfection is a kind of performance art, an attempt to seduce the reader into compliance. The prose says: see how elegant sentences become when rules are followed. But the critic whispers: elegance is not universal, it is cultural, and what counts as “correct” today may be mocked tomorrow.
The historical weight of grammar instruction also hovers over the book like a ghost. For centuries, grammar has been used as a gatekeeping mechanism in education. The well-born child drilled in Latin grammar in a nineteenth-century English school was not merely learning how to parse sentences; he was learning his place in the hierarchy of empire, learning to wield authority through linguistic control. Grammar was the mark of civilization, the proof of refinement. In contrast, the ungrammatical was equated with barbarism, ignorance, the margins of society. The Grammar Bible inherits this long tradition, even as it tries to democratize grammar for a wider readership. In this sense, it is a late-modern artifact of linguistic anxiety: caught between prescriptive authority and descriptive tolerance, between the elitism of tradition and the inclusivity of popular demand.
And what of the postmodern playfulness of language itself? One cannot help but notice that the book, for all its clarity, is humorless compared to the exuberance of writers who delight in breaking rules. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake laughs at the very idea of grammar, exploding syntax into dream-language. e.e. cummings made a career out of mocking capitalization, punctuation, and syntax. The Beats poured raw speech onto the page, refusing the tidy categories of grammar. Contemporary internet language—memes, texts, tweets—reinvents grammar daily, bending and breaking rules with gleeful irreverence. Against these forces of linguistic anarchy, The Grammar Bible feels like a bulwark doomed to crumble. It cannot contain the play of language; at best, it can document its shifting boundaries.
Yet perhaps this is precisely why the book matters. In the age of digital communication, where every second message seems to discard conventional grammar, there is still a desire for anchors, for reference points. Strumpf and Douglas offer readers a sense of security: a place to check whether one is “right” or “wrong,” even if that sense of rightness is provisional. The book’s popularity reveals that grammar, far from being obsolete, remains a site of cultural negotiation. People may laugh at pedants, but they also anxiously Google whether to use “affect” or “effect.” Grammar continues to matter because it continues to be contested.
And so, in reviewing The Grammar Bible, one arrives at a paradox worthy of postmodernism itself: the book is both necessary and impossible. It is necessary because readers crave certainty in a world of linguistic flux. It is impossible because language refuses to stay still, refuses to obey final authority. The authors write as though they can settle questions, but every settlement opens new disputes. Grammar, like religion, thrives on interpretation, debate, schism. There is no final grammar, just as there is no final theology. There is only the endless play of meaning, the ceaseless reinvention of rules, the power struggles encoded in every usage.
What Strumpf and Douglas perhaps do not say outright—but what their book demonstrates inadvertently—is that grammar is not about truth but about trust. We trust that when we use certain structures, our listeners will understand us. We trust that certain forms carry social weight. We trust that the rules we learn will be recognized by others. Grammar is a contract, not a law. And like any contract, it can be renegotiated. The postmodern reader sees The Grammar Bible not as a set of commandments but as a record of negotiations, a snapshot of what a certain group of authors and readers at a certain moment believed to be correct. Tomorrow the negotiations may change, and the Bible will need revision.
In this light, the most radical way to read The Grammar Bible is as a self-contradictory performance text, a meta-commentary on its own futility. It tells us how to write “correctly,” even as it reveals that correctness is a cultural fiction. It comforts us with rules, even as it admits their exceptions. It calls itself a Bible, even as it undermines its own authority with humor, caveats, and concessions. This is why the book endures: not because it settles questions but because it dramatizes the very impossibility of settling them. It is a mirror of our anxieties, a confession of our longing for stability in the midst of linguistic chaos.
Thus the postmodern review must conclude not with a judgment of the book’s success or failure, but with the recognition that success and failure are themselves inadequate categories here. The Grammar Bible succeeds precisely by failing to be absolute, by betraying its own impossibility. It becomes a text that reveals the instability of texts, a rulebook that exposes the fiction of rules, a Bible that confesses its own heresies.
To read it is to be comforted and unsettled at once, to cling to rules while laughing at their absurdities. In that sense, it is the perfect grammar book for a postmodern age: not a fortress of certainty, but a theater of contradictions, where correctness is both sacred and mocked, and language forever escapes the nets we cast around it.
On the other hand, words leak out of their cages, dance between meanings, evolve in the wild, mock the supposed authority of grammar itself. Into this tension strolls The Grammar Bible by Michael Strumpf and Auriel Douglas, a book that, by virtue of its title, announces itself with a swagger of absolutism—“Bible,” after all, the last word in doctrinal authority—and yet, once read closely, betrays the postmodern paradox it tries so hard to conceal.
For in trying to be a final reference, a “Bible,” it simultaneously reveals that grammar is never final, never fixed, but endlessly shifting, endlessly misused, endlessly contested. It is a book that is most illuminating when it fails to control language, for its failures shine a light on the instability of linguistic authority.
Consider the subtitle: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Grammar but Didn’t Know Whom to Ask. Already, we are caught in a grammatical paradox. The word “whom” is both pedantically precise and socially archaic. It is a word that the authors themselves would defend as correct usage, while most speakers of English long ago consigned it to the attic of linguistic curiosities, dusted off only by lawyers and grammarians.
The subtitle, therefore, is both a joke and a provocation: it appeals to those who want to be right while gesturing toward the anxiety that “right” is a shifting category. Who asks “whom” anymore? Who cares? And yet the book insists there is a world of readers who both do and don’t care, caught between the democratic looseness of language as it is spoken and the authoritarian strictures of grammar as it is taught. This paradox is the real subject of the book, whether or not the authors acknowledge it.
The project of The Grammar Bible is, at first glance, straightforward. It sets out to explain grammar systematically to readers bewildered by the rules. It is organized as one might expect of a reference book: nouns, verbs, participles, clauses, punctuation, all laid out with examples and witty commentary. Strumpf and Douglas attempt to balance clarity with accessibility, answering the sorts of questions people are too embarrassed to ask. Why is it “he and I” rather than “him and me”? Why does a dangling participle sound awkward? What is the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses? The tone is both friendly and pedagogical, and for many readers the book may indeed serve as a much-needed lifeline in the quicksand of grammatical uncertainty. Yet what is striking is not the content itself—which, after all, can be found in a hundred other grammar handbooks—but the way the book reveals grammar as a deeply cultural performance, a stage upon which anxieties about class, correctness, and legitimacy play themselves out.
Postmodern theory has long dismantled the idea of language as transparent or stable. Derrida, Barthes, Kristeva, and countless others remind us that meaning slides, that every signifier is haunted by its instability, that rules are only temporary gestures toward order. In this sense, The Grammar Bible becomes a deeply ironic artifact: it wants to freeze the flow of language, but in doing so it inadvertently dramatizes the impossibility of its own mission. To speak of “rules” of English is to ignore that those rules are constantly contested, enforced unevenly across social strata, and subject to evolution.
Consider the example of the split infinitive, that endlessly debated construction immortalized by Star Trek’s “to boldly go.” Prescriptive grammarians have long frowned upon it, citing rules imported from Latin. Descriptive linguists point out that English is not Latin and that actual speakers split infinitives all the time without confusion. The Grammar Bible tries to strike a compromise, noting the controversy while gently leaning toward permissiveness. But what does this reveal? That grammar is less about clarity of meaning than about social authority. To split or not to split becomes less a question of intelligibility and more a question of which linguistic tribe one belongs to: the guardians of tradition or the anarchists of usage.
The postmodern critic will notice that in these very moments of prescriptive hesitation, The Grammar Bible reveals its cultural politics. Grammar is never just grammar—it is a discourse of power. The authors’ invocation of the “Bible” suggests both the sacredness of linguistic correctness and the impossibility of total adherence. Just as the religious Bible contains contradictions and demands interpretation, so too does the grammar Bible. Its rules are proclaimed with certainty, but its margins are filled with exceptions, caveats, compromises. This instability is precisely what postmodernism celebrates: the recognition that authority is provisional, that systems are self-contradictory, that the supposed solidity of grammar is undermined by the slipperiness of usage.
Reading Strumpf and Douglas, one cannot help but recall Foucault’s observations about discourse and discipline. Grammar is a technology of control, a way of shaping subjects. To know grammar is to demonstrate membership in a literate elite, to wield authority in bureaucratic, academic, or legal settings. To misuse grammar is to risk dismissal, mockery, even exclusion. The authors of The Grammar Bible are aware of this to some extent, and they write with a populist friendliness that tries to include rather than exclude. Yet the very act of creating a “Bible” of grammar reinforces the idea that there is one true path, one sanctioned authority. The postmodern reader recognizes this as both impossible and revealing: grammar is never neutral, and every attempt to canonize it is an exercise of cultural power.
What makes the book fascinating, then, is not merely its content but its contradictions. It encourages readers to take comfort in rules, yet the examples it provides often betray the unruliness of English. It insists on clarity while acknowledging that clarity itself is subjective, dependent on context. It praises correctness while hinting at the absurdity of some rules. Take, for instance, the old injunction against ending a sentence with a preposition. The authors explain the rule but also acknowledge its artificiality. And in doing so, they echo the postmodern idea that rules are less eternal truths than inherited fictions, myths passed down to maintain a certain order. To enforce them blindly is to ignore the vibrant life of language, its resistance to rigidity.
There is also something deliciously ironic in the fact that a book about grammar must itself be written in prose that is both correct and inviting. Strumpf and Douglas succeed admirably in this regard, crafting sentences that are precise without being pedantic, lively without sacrificing clarity. Yet even here the postmodern reader cannot help but notice that the very act of demonstrating grammatical perfection is a kind of performance art, an attempt to seduce the reader into compliance. The prose says: see how elegant sentences become when rules are followed. But the critic whispers: elegance is not universal, it is cultural, and what counts as “correct” today may be mocked tomorrow.
The historical weight of grammar instruction also hovers over the book like a ghost. For centuries, grammar has been used as a gatekeeping mechanism in education. The well-born child drilled in Latin grammar in a nineteenth-century English school was not merely learning how to parse sentences; he was learning his place in the hierarchy of empire, learning to wield authority through linguistic control. Grammar was the mark of civilization, the proof of refinement. In contrast, the ungrammatical was equated with barbarism, ignorance, the margins of society. The Grammar Bible inherits this long tradition, even as it tries to democratize grammar for a wider readership. In this sense, it is a late-modern artifact of linguistic anxiety: caught between prescriptive authority and descriptive tolerance, between the elitism of tradition and the inclusivity of popular demand.
And what of the postmodern playfulness of language itself? One cannot help but notice that the book, for all its clarity, is humorless compared to the exuberance of writers who delight in breaking rules. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake laughs at the very idea of grammar, exploding syntax into dream-language. e.e. cummings made a career out of mocking capitalization, punctuation, and syntax. The Beats poured raw speech onto the page, refusing the tidy categories of grammar. Contemporary internet language—memes, texts, tweets—reinvents grammar daily, bending and breaking rules with gleeful irreverence. Against these forces of linguistic anarchy, The Grammar Bible feels like a bulwark doomed to crumble. It cannot contain the play of language; at best, it can document its shifting boundaries.
Yet perhaps this is precisely why the book matters. In the age of digital communication, where every second message seems to discard conventional grammar, there is still a desire for anchors, for reference points. Strumpf and Douglas offer readers a sense of security: a place to check whether one is “right” or “wrong,” even if that sense of rightness is provisional. The book’s popularity reveals that grammar, far from being obsolete, remains a site of cultural negotiation. People may laugh at pedants, but they also anxiously Google whether to use “affect” or “effect.” Grammar continues to matter because it continues to be contested.
And so, in reviewing The Grammar Bible, one arrives at a paradox worthy of postmodernism itself: the book is both necessary and impossible. It is necessary because readers crave certainty in a world of linguistic flux. It is impossible because language refuses to stay still, refuses to obey final authority. The authors write as though they can settle questions, but every settlement opens new disputes. Grammar, like religion, thrives on interpretation, debate, schism. There is no final grammar, just as there is no final theology. There is only the endless play of meaning, the ceaseless reinvention of rules, the power struggles encoded in every usage.
What Strumpf and Douglas perhaps do not say outright—but what their book demonstrates inadvertently—is that grammar is not about truth but about trust. We trust that when we use certain structures, our listeners will understand us. We trust that certain forms carry social weight. We trust that the rules we learn will be recognized by others. Grammar is a contract, not a law. And like any contract, it can be renegotiated. The postmodern reader sees The Grammar Bible not as a set of commandments but as a record of negotiations, a snapshot of what a certain group of authors and readers at a certain moment believed to be correct. Tomorrow the negotiations may change, and the Bible will need revision.
In this light, the most radical way to read The Grammar Bible is as a self-contradictory performance text, a meta-commentary on its own futility. It tells us how to write “correctly,” even as it reveals that correctness is a cultural fiction. It comforts us with rules, even as it admits their exceptions. It calls itself a Bible, even as it undermines its own authority with humor, caveats, and concessions. This is why the book endures: not because it settles questions but because it dramatizes the very impossibility of settling them. It is a mirror of our anxieties, a confession of our longing for stability in the midst of linguistic chaos.
Thus the postmodern review must conclude not with a judgment of the book’s success or failure, but with the recognition that success and failure are themselves inadequate categories here. The Grammar Bible succeeds precisely by failing to be absolute, by betraying its own impossibility. It becomes a text that reveals the instability of texts, a rulebook that exposes the fiction of rules, a Bible that confesses its own heresies.
To read it is to be comforted and unsettled at once, to cling to rules while laughing at their absurdities. In that sense, it is the perfect grammar book for a postmodern age: not a fortress of certainty, but a theater of contradictions, where correctness is both sacred and mocked, and language forever escapes the nets we cast around it.
September 24, 2013
This will feed your inner word nerd--lots of digressions and discussions of sub-sections of grammar. For usability in practice and application, it's not as accessible as "The McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage."
July 21, 2021
I read this book when I was trying to work as a freelance content writer online and I had to perfect my grammar. I wanted to understand grammar rules that I seemed to know automatically. I actually really enjoyed this time in my life, when I read books about grammar.
October 18, 2025
The Grammar Bible is a perfect book for those looking to learn English grammar quickly. The author wrote the book in a way that was entertaining while still being extremely informative. I used this to study for an exam. I wasn't previously taught grammar at my school (Surprising) and I managed to learn it all in one month and pass the exam with flying colors. Take that anecdote as you will.
August 7, 2020
I read this book against my will. However, I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would. It was about grammar, which is probably the most boring topic possible, but the author was actually pretty funny, which made it bearable.
June 29, 2024
very good and easy to read
August 31, 2018
This took me a long time to read as I would often try and cram in a few chapters once I had finished a different work of fiction – it is a book on grammar after all… Things don’t come much drier. That said it may have been the best thing I have done for my writing endeavors. And if you can grin and bear it I think everyone should read a book of this ilk. All aspects of grammar were well represented and at times fun (a term used loosely).
April 23, 2013
I do not make a move without this book. It was a great read and sometimes the writers are actually pretty hilarious-hard to do when it comes to writing about the rules of grammar. I make all my students read it and having it here has solved grammar differences many a times. Get yourself a copy!
March 1, 2015
A must have reference point for any aspiring writer. Useful for those moments when you are at a loss for what to do. Not exactly a book to read cover to cover...but you totally could if you wanted to. It's almost set up like a For Dummies book, with more personality.
July 25, 2008
I mean, if you can make the passive voice seem useful, you've got yourself a winner.
Currently reading
March 15, 2013It's wonderful to see a logical dissection of English infused with humor and goodwill.
August 4, 2010
This is an excellent reference book that will be added to my library.
March 22, 2011
Taking myself back to school. This was just right for me. I really needed a refresher and I really liked his conversational tone and the examples.
June 10, 2013
i own this book now...
November 16, 2013
An easy book to reference for any grammar issues, but definately not a book one should read cover to cover.
Want to read
March 4, 2016goodgood
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews