by Sharon Eliza Nichols
St. Martin’s Press, $9.99, 118 pages
The problem with looking for bad grammar is that you will find it far too easily. Sharon Nichols found 150 misuses of grammar and compiled them into this collection. Divided into ten sections, More Badder Grammar! lays out the errors for your entertainment and edification, all in the hopes that you will learn from other people’s mistakes and not repeat what you see here.
This book would have been far more entertaining if the grammar mistakes were bigger and more varied. Rather than finding mistakes in major magazines or television programs, it focused on small businesses and other locations that you would be unlikely to encounter, even if you lived in areas where the mistakes showed up. Worse, it seems to concentrate on misplaced apostrophes; it would have been better to have seen a wider variety of typographical errors than just a few variations on a quickly exhausted theme, especially given how relatively few samples were shown. This book could have been a lot better.
Jamais Jochim