Red Pen: A Grammar Podcast

Pop quiz, hotshot: When does a period go inside a parenthesis? How many commas are too many for a sentence to bear? When do you use single quotes rather than double? Should you ever hit the space bar twice? And for extra credit: How is a poorly punctuated paragraph like pornography? Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ryan Davis Thing 2: Mike Laws Producer: Ama...

Genitives, gerunds, postpositive adjectives—oh, my! There's still a lot to say about the tangled mess of possessive forms, so let's get back to it. You won't want to miss Producer Amanda's first on-air appearance (to dish on the royals, natch) or Mike's unforgivable misreading of a fine point in the Chicago Manual of Style. Plus: Meat Loaf, Lorde, Three Doors Down, and Thr...

When it comes to ownership in English, even the basics get real wrinkly real fast. Best to get right into it. So what do the Simpsons, Mighty Ducks, Danish film directors, and nepo babies have to do with anything? 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 O...

A deep dive into a "rule" that arguably never was—and certainly isn't now. So where did it come from? As usual, a poet's to blame. Digressions include the animal tranquilizer xylazine, the authorship of works credited to Shakespeare, the dubiousness of quotes attributed to Churchill, Restoration-era rap battles, and Beavis and Butt-Head. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the...

You might've BID on a vintage loom on eBay—but if you didn't get it, you BADE it farewell. If you did, maybe you WOVE a pair of mittens so pretty your sister WEAVED through traffic to snag them. Verbs with different senses can be tricky, but it's nothing to get HUNG about (and certainly not HANGED over!). We're here to sort out these and other dual-use words, when we're no...

As a grammar podcast, our aim is to edify as well as entertain. <---If you didn't see anything wrong with that sentence, you need this episode in your life. (If you did, hang around for some hockey locker room talk about vegans, libertarians, what Wednesday Addams got unforgivably wrong about Edgar Allan Poe, and how Mike once managed to weird out… John Waters?!) Questions/comments/ideas/s...

The grocery store is where good grammar goes to die. But you needn't be afeard of "less" versus "fewer." It ain't that complicated. Except when it is. Digressions include Paraguayan beef, tightly tucked duvets, streaming services' subtitles, and how young Mike got hoodwinked by those 12-CDs-for-a-penny scams. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We...

Homing in on honing our vocab, we effect various affects, gibing and jiving about words that don't jibe. Stick around for tangents on Bush v. Trump malapropisms, the dubious staying power of Stephen Colbert's "truthiness," and whether A Clockwork Orange can teach English-speakers conversational Russian. Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you. Thing 1: Ry...

"Bet," "based," "goated": we're in a brave new world of hyperfast coinage. But does this phase faze you? Are you nonplussed? Episode 2 provides the answers to help elegantly shimmy (or perhaps shinny) your way out of these uncomfortable questions. Divagations include: the merits of Goodfellas v. Casino, the shenanigans of Norman Mailer and other literary bad boys...

To whom or not to whom, that is the question.  The word's going the way of the northern white rhino, but is it ever wrong to use "who" in its place? Will your fancy dinner party guests think you're a troglodyte?  And what if you overcorrect and stick a "whom" where it doesn't belong?  All this, plus digressions on red being the real warmest color, why it's m...

Welcome to the weird, wild, scintillatingly stylish, and syntactically sound world of RED PEN—the grammar podcast that won't put you to sleep.  Brought to you by the Columbia Journalism Review and hosted by old buds Ryan Davis and Mike Laws, RED PEN plucks examples from the news (as well as from novels, music, movies—wherever!) to answer all those questions you were too afraid to ask in Engli...