Debbie Jacob
All students need a home reference library, and this long vacation is the perfect time to work on that goal. The books below make the foundation of my reference library. They are more in-depth than the sources you’ll get on the Internet, but they’re surprisingly reader-friendly for reference books.
The Knots in English: A Manual for Caribbean Users by Merle Hodge – She is best known for her Caribbean classic novel Crick Crack, Monkey, but Hodge’s grammar book, The Knots in English, is an invaluable resource for Caribbean students.
In addition to her succinct points on formal English grammar, sections in grey provide the Jamaican and Trinidadian creole equivalents. This is an essential comparative resource for teaching creole as a language with its own grammar and vocabulary. Hodge’s boxed points showing Jamaican and Trinidadian creole side by side allow students to understand how these two creole languages differ.
She includes brief lessons on useful topics including stubborn modalities like the use of "will" for "would," and how creole languages treat pronouns.
If there’s only one book in your reference library, it must be The Knots in English.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynn Truss – Journalist Truss establishes a fun-filled, light tone for discussions on the weighty subject of punctuation.
The title of this book is a popular English joke, which goes like this: A panda walks into a restaurant, orders a sandwich, eats it, gets up to leave and fires two shots in the air.
“Why did you do that?” asks the waiter. “Because that’s what pandas do. Look it up,” the panda says as he walks out.
The anecdote illustrates just how a comma can change the meaning of a sentence. Pandas eat shoots. Put a comma between "eats" and "shoots" and you get two separate verbs. With commas, the panda is shooting a gun rather than eating his shoots.
I used the elementary-level, illustrated version of Truss’s book with kindergarten students, and you wouldn’t believe how excited they got about commas as they deciphered their meaning in the illustrated sentences. This is a fun way to establish an understanding of punctuation from an early age.
On Writing by Stephen King – There are many excellent books about the nuts and bolts of writing, but this one by the famous master of horror stories still tops many writing lists.
Be forewarned, it’s gritty and full of expletives, but King makes salient points about the process of writing in a light manner, which students appreciate.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders – I first learned of this book from students in an online writing class I took at Stanford University in 2020 during the pandemic. I bought the book, and it sat on a shelf for two years.
When I finally took the plunge, I understood why it is one of the most popular books on literary analysis.
Saunders, a creative writing teacher and author from Syracuse Uni
