The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed

As an English teacher, I agree with the reviews that express dismay at Ms. Gordon's idiosyncratic application of traditional grammar rules. However, the handbook's examples, illustrations, and dry wit make it a much more palatable resource for the teenagers I teach than the musty handbooks provided by my district. Those who find interesting the vagaries of the English language's structure will be charmed.

This is what needs to be taught in schools. I taught in high schools for several years and the punctuation was very bad. Any teacher can keep it handy for their own review or for lesson ideas.

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The New Well-Tempered Sentence (Houghton Mifflin, 1993)

I'm still not quite sure how much I enjoyed The New Well-Tempered Sentence. A lot of it is dead-on and well worth reading, but there were a few places where I wondered what on earth Gordon was thinking (when did it become grammatically correct to end a question with any punctuation but a question mark?). The structural aspects, though, are not the reason this book (and its companion volume, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire) has been through two editions and a number of printings that's rapidly approaching the "countless" level; the book is still read (and re-read and re-read and...) for the examples Gordon uses to illustrate the structural points, which gradually unfold into, almost, a novel of their own, an odd little comedy of manners that makes very little sense, but is intriguing enough to keep people wondering.

Interesting, and certainly enough so to send me on to The Deluxe Transitive Vampire. *** ½

'The Well Tempered Sentence' is a slim volume (only 93 pages) and is well presented with a pleasing font, playful examples, and some interesting illustrations. The good part of the book is the easy layout and vivid, to-the-point examples. The bad part is that it is just a little bit cheesy, and of no great help if you are a serious writer.

I think this would be a fine volume to gift a teenage girl with, especially one who loves to write, whether it is stories or her diary or journals. The chapters are well separated, making it easy to find a quick-and-dirty example of the punctuation's usage. The book covers the period, the question mark, the exclamation point, the comma, the semicolon, the colon, the hyphen, the dash, multiple punctuation, quotation marks, parentheses, brackets, and ellipses.

Certainly a pleasing and helpful reference for those just beginning to find the pleasure of placing pen to paper, it becomes useless after high-school English has been conquered. If you are looking for a nice, useful gift for a budding young female journalist, 'The Well Tempered Sentence' would be a useful tool for her. If you want in-depth help with advanced writing, pass on this book.

This book has helped me so much with my grammar. Really! I were flunking out of college English so my friend said to me, "You should get this book - it is really good" and so I got the book and boy was she right it really helped me with my run on sentences and the other problems I was having like not knowing, how to use, commas and stuff.