Revised and Expanded Blue Book Coming Next Month

The eleventh edition of The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation is set for a February debut. It has been six years since the tenth edition was published. So when the publisher, Jossey-Bass, requested another go-round, the team at GrammarBook.com was elated.

We trust that readers will find the new, extensively revised and expanded version in keeping with the author and founder Jane Straus’s vision of a direct, concise, unfussy grammar book.

The Blue Book, which started life as a booklet for California state employees, has now sold around 200,000 copies. Over the years, we’ve seen the number of subscribers to our weekly blog grow from dozens to scores to hundreds; now, there are almost 40,000 of you worldwide.

As we have grown, we have heard from readers from every walk of life and all corners of the earth. Some of you have been outspoken about things we could be doing better—and we are listening. We can’t forget an e-mail we received from a group of amateur linguists in England who felt we were too quick to label as “rules” what might better be termed conventions. One example of this distinction: although American writers and editors insist upon the placing of commas and periods inside quotation marks without exception, it nonetheless smacks of provincial pomposity to call this a “rule” of English when virtually every other English-speaking country ignores it.

So, with a nod to that shrewd e-mail, the new edition stresses the difference between rules on the one hand and conventions, customs, and tendencies on the other. For instance, there are ironclad rules for apostrophes—nowhere will you see the possessive of women written womens’. But other uses of the apostrophe are open for debate. Some write Learn your ABCs and others prefer your ABC’s. Some write the 1990s and others swear by the 1990’s.

The new Blue Book takes on English in all its often maddening complexity, acknowledging its quirks, gray areas, exceptions, limitations, and contradictions. We realize that people want straight answers, but with English, there sometimes aren’t any, and we would be remiss in saying otherwise.

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