The Rock-'n'-Roll Guide to Grammar and Style
Believe it or not, you can use your favorite Rock-‘n’-Roll song titles to show you, clearly and concisely, how English grammar and style work—and it’s fun! Inspired by a lifelong love of music and language, this book captures the brilliant bond between music and language, using song titles as an innovative and memorable way to teach grammar and style. The book does not critique grammar and style use in Rock-‘n’-Roll song titles. Instead, it celebrates this use and demonstrates different kinds of sentences, parts of speech, verb tenses, stylistic figures of speech, and more. The book starts with short but complete sentences—song title subject/verb combinations of songs you know such as “Love hurts” and “Voices carry.” The patterns of English grammar and style then become strikingly visible when you see them in the titles of Rock-‘n’-Roll songs you love, all the way from the 1950s to today.
Michael J. Zerbe teaches writing, editing, science fiction, and rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania, USA. He published the well-received Composition and the Rhetoric of Science: Engaging the Dominant Discourse in 2007, and his work has also appeared in a number of edited collections and academic journals. He taught in India in 2015 and in Bulgaria in 2009, and won a Health Communications Fellowship to the National Cancer Institute, USA, in 1990. He earned a PhD in English (with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition) from Purdue University, a Master’s of Technical and Scientific Communication from Miami University (Ohio), and a BS in Chemistry from James Madison University, USA.
“In The Rock-‘n’-Roll Guide to Grammar and Style, Michael J. Zerbe introduces a powerful method for descriptive grammar instruction. […] By using music to teach grammar in his own classroom, Zerbe developed an important method for grammar education, and [this book] serves to make that method widely available. The book is embedded with years of Zerbe’s personal time and effort, accumulating the great library of examples from which he drew for this book and inventing the process by which they would be presented and analysed. A clear lover of culture, language and music, Zerbe reminds the reader that it is we who make language, and that we ought to have access to education of language as we us it. […] But possibly the book’s most valuable contribution is that in it Zerbe establishes the baseline for a method with incredible potential, one which can be further developed, perhaps in a collaborative manner amongst other grammar instructors and researchers.”
Kevin K. Thomas
The ATEG Journal, Vol. 29, 2020
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