Red Pen: A Grammar Podcast

Prepare to be scandalized. Oh, your stars! Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite Red Pen songs over on the Red Pen Official Playlist . To use Red Pen chapters, swipe up on the Now Playing screen or click the top-right-corner Chapters button on Apple Podcasts for macOS. Show Notes The Sc...

How to crack the attention economy? Coldcock your readers. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite Red Pen songs over on the Red Pen Official Playlist . To use Red Pen chapters, swipe up on the Now Playing screen or click the top-right-corner Chapters button on Apple Podcasts for macOS. S...

Come for the critical reappraisal of ‘Shakespeare in Love,’ stay for Mike’s shocking revelation. Anon, good nurse! Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite Red Pen songs over on the Red Pen Official Playlist . To use Red Pen chapters, swipe up on the Now Playing screen or click the top-rig...

Oh, boy, are the “stick to the topic” ppl gonna love this one. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite Red Pen songs over on the Red Pen Official Playlist . To use Red Pen chapters, swipe up on the Now Playing screen or click the top-right-corner Chapters button on Apple Podcasts for macO...

When, whether, and how often. With a little help from Humbert Humbert. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite Red Pen songs over on the Red Pen Official Playlist . To use Red Pen chapters, swipe up on the Now Playing screen or click the top-right-corner Chapters button on Apple Podcasts...

Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love nuance.  Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite Red Pen songs over on the Red Pen Official Playlist . To use Red Pen chapters, swipe up on the Now Playing screen or click the top-right-corner Chapters button on Apple Podcasts for macOS.

You best believe we seen this trend. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite Red Pen songs over on the Red Pen Official Playlist . To use Red Pen chapters, swipe up on the Now Playing screen or click the top-right-corner Chapters button on Apple Podcasts for macOS.

In which Mike finally reads the comments. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite Red Pen songs over on the Red Pen Official Playlist . To use Red Pen chapters, swipe up on the Now Playing screen or click the top-right-corner Chapters button on Apple Podcasts for macOS.

How Padma Lakshmi schooled us all on the "middle voice." Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite Red Pen songs over on the Red Pen Official Playlist . To use Red Pen chapters, swipe up on the Now Playing screen or click the top-right-corner Chapters button on Apple Podcasts for...

And a few we hate. And, for some reason, a few that are German. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Show Notes: The Staten Island Ferry Schedule (But sign your marriage license on dry land .) Out of Office podcast Phonesthemes @germanonliners

On the record, off the record, on background, deep background: What to expect when you're expecting to be a source. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite Red Pen songs over on the Red Pen Official Playlist . To use Red Pen chapters, swipe up on the Now Playing screen or click the t...

It's an epidemic, people: one-word compound nouns standing in for phrasal verbs. Is Kelly Clarkson to blame? Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach

Being a podcast produced under the aegis of a university, Red Pen is about to make like the kiddies, ditching the books and reclining poolside for the summer. We'll be back after Labor Day, armed with killer tans, fresh Trapper Keepers—and an exciting slate of guests. Till then! Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Am...

Does English offer an ungendered third-person singular, and if so, who uses it? Everyone and their mother, as it turns out—going all the way back to the Middle Ages. Yinz gotta hear this one. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite Red Pen songs over on the Red Pen Official Playlist . To...

Ghastly puns aside, English is pretty agreeable in terms of agreement—but still presents some pitfalls when it comes to the alignment of grammatical number or person. Join us as we get into all that, plus stick around for (more) chatter about ChatGPT and about the most kickass Finnish film maybe ever. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike...

What do the musical Rent, the movie Seven, The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, Kurt Cobain, and Lisa Simpson have in common? Why, they all imparted important, improbable vocab onto a young Ryan, Amanda, and Mike, of course (of course!).  Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite Red Pen songs o...

The pluckiest conjugation in the English language; the tense that won't go gentle into that good night. Reports of its death have been… somewhat exaggerated. (Though if it weren't for country lyrics, who knows where we'd be?) Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite Red Pen...

Unless you're that one guy from Goodfellas—or verses one and three of a classic pop song—it's probably not a great idea to repeat yourself. But are you doing it without realizing? Never fear: Ryan, Mike, and Amanda are here with a list of everyday pleonasms to keep an ear out for. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Produ...

Restrictive or nonrestrictive, essential or non-: let's dispense with the terminology and ditch the reference manuals in favor of practical advice (namely on whether and when to use those damn commas). Plus, more on everyone's favorite lovably fallible chatbot. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach...

The world's changing, and so are the rules for moving through it. But did New York magazine err in its recent guide to 21st-century etiquette? Join us as we hash out canceling plans the day of, blasting out iMessages at 5am, responding "k" vs. "kk" vs. "ok," and… winking? Plus stick around after the bell rings for a spirited chat about fad diets. Questions/commen...

Do you nictitate, or do you blink? Were the Clampetts new-money, or would you call them parvenus or arrivistes? When it comes to word choice, English draws the battle lines across a few fronts: the plainspoken versus the purple, the Saxonic versus the Latinate, Hemingway versus Nabokov. So let's get into it. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis T...

There are a great many ways to write terrible verse—lazy rhymes, half-baked conceits, catastrophic metrical breakdowns. But where others have failed, u/poem_for_your_sprog sings the subreddits electric. Look on his works, ye unlettered, and despair. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Amanda Darrach Find all your favorite...

What voguish phrase makes Mike drop his first on-air F-bomb? Which term gets Ryan's vote for word of the decade? And what contributions did you, Dear Listener, make to this godforsaken list? Smash that play button for the answers to these and other pressing queries (to wit, on Russian poisonings, the best Judas, and MTA campaigns we just can't quit). Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in...

We all use them, we all hate them: fad terms. How do they catch on? Why should careful writing eschew them? Listen as Mike attempts to answer despite a determined frog in the throat, and Ryan attempts to shame him for bingeing the Mighty Ducks reboot (while copping to watching the ne plus ultra of trash TV, Netflix's You). Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing...

How litigious are the rights holders of the most beloved catalogue in music? Join us as we find out, stopping along the way to dish on Dick Morris, Ugly Kid Joe, Vladimir Nabokov, Mad Men, and (oh yeah) a dense little handful of troublesome marks: questions and quotations, colons and semis, dashes and parens. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing...