The Elements of Fucking Style

The truth about English is that it can get pretty boring. Dangling modifiers, gerunds, punctuation marks—it’s enough to make you want to drop out of high school. Swearing and sex on the other hand, well, these time-honored pastimes warm the cockles of our hearts. Now, The Elements of F*cking Style drags English grammar out of the ivory tower and into the gutter, injecting a dull subject with a much-needed dose of color.

This book addresses everything from common questions (“What the hell is a pronoun?”) to philosophical conundrums (“Does not using paragraphs or periods make my thesis read like it was written by a mental patient?”).

Other valuable sections include:

• All I’ve got in this world are my sentences and my balls,
  and I don’t break ’em for nobody
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• Pronouns are a real bitch
•
• A colon is more than an organ that gets cancer
•
• The positive form beats the shit out of wishy-washy writing
•
• Symmetry is the tits
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• Words your bound to fuck up

One glance at your friend’s blog should tell you everything you need to know about the sorry state of the English language. This book gives you the tools you need to stop looking like an idiot on message boards and in interoffice memos. Grammar has never before been so much fucking fun.

Members of haughty intellectual clubs like Mensa and The Prometheus Society, grammar nerds (and cousins) Chris Baker and Jacob Hansen saw the need for a grammar revolution after witnessing one too many botched Facebook status updates, failed message board rants, and moronic company-wide emails.

Knowing that any attempt to provoke the huddled masses into action would be physically impossible—particularly those members who wear their pants several inches blow their asses—Chris and Jacob instead relied on their cunning. Taking on faith that the word "fuck" would convince even the most zealous dullard that their ends were not educational, their mission in stealth began. If they can make grammar more appealing to just one person who otherwise wouldn't have given the subject a second thought, then they've succeeded. That, and maybe a positive review from The New Yorker. That would blow their hair back too.

Chris Baker lives and works as a writer in Tribeca, and Jacob Hansen attends law school in North Carolina.