The Rock-'n'-Roll Guide to Grammar and Style

Book excerpt: 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.