'Rebel With a Clause'

 

[As readers can see from the headline below, this post is about—wait for it—grammar.  (Actually, it’s about a grammarian and a documentary film about her.) 

[ROTters will know that I have been a writing teacher and that in this blog, I have posted many articles about writing and writing mavens.  I haven’t posted much about grammar per se, but that’s part and parcel of writing—knowing and properly using grammar.

[I first taught writing in the mid-1980s.  I was a doctoral student hired to teach a required undergraduate writing course.  When I grew up, in the Eisenhower ’50s, we still learned grammar, syntax, the parts of speech, and spelling and how to parse a sentence and diagram it.

[I was chagrined to find that none of my students knew English grammar.  Clearly, learning grammar had been deemed old-fashioned in the decades between my high school graduation in 1965 and the years my undergrads finished their secondary education. 

[I wasn’t so much disturbed because my writing students didn’t know the grammatical conventions I’d had to learn.  I discovered, though, that I couldn’t discuss with the tyro writers what the problems they were having communicating in writing were without using the grammatical terms that were the jargon of writers and writing.  I had to start teaching grammar (sort of surreptitiously) so my students and I would have a common language when we talked about their writing.] 

“GRAMMARIANS GATHER TO CELEBRATE AN AMBASSADOR”
by Katherine Rosman 

[This report ran in the New York Times on 9 March 2025, in the “Metropolitan” section.  It was posted on the Times website as “Grammar Fans Flock to a Film About Participles and Gerunds” on 6 March and updated on 8 March.]

At the New York premiere of “Rebel With a Clause,” there was a shared love of language.

Jennifer Griffin stood outside a movie theater on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, waving to a friend.

“I’m here with all the other dorks!” she called out, using a prepositional phrase to get the attention of Lisa Kuklinski. Soon, they were joined by Miranda Schwartz, a copy editor [a person who revises or corrects a manuscript, text, etc., for publication, especially to find and correct errors in style, punctuation, and grammar] who was wearing a shirt that read “I’m Silently Correcting Your Grammar.” Notably, the message lacked a punctuation mark at the end.

The women are members of a group chat in which they text each other about the words they find in the New York Times Spelling Bee game. This was their girls’ night out. “When you find someone as nerdy as you are about the Oxford comma,” said Ms. Kuklinski, an actuary, “you find you have plenty of other things in common.”

They were attending the first New York screening of “Rebel With a Clause,” a new documentary about a woman who set up a “grammar table” in all 50 states for passers-by to stop and ask her about punctuation and past participles.

The film’s star, Ellen Jovin, schleps her table from Maine to Hawaii and each state in between, dispensing lessons that are precise but not pedantic, engaging in the sort of face-to-face conversations with strangers that are so absent from quotidian contemporary life.

At the screening this week, more than 450 grammar aficionados (the median age hovered in the early-AARP-membership range) came to celebrate “Rebel With a Clause,” which was directed by Ms. Jovin’s husband, Brandt Johnson.

[AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, is a U.S. interest group that focuses on issues affecting Americans 50 years old and older.

[Rebel With a Clause was produced by Syntaxis Productions (a communication skills training firm, cofounded in 2007 by Johnson and Jovin) and released in the United States on 8 February 2025. It runs 1:26 (86 minutes).]

Before and after the screening, filmgoers bantered about whether to place a comma after the penultimate item in a list [i.e., the Oxford comma], discussed the appropriate usage of “lie” and “lay” and united in a shared reverence for language, ideas and the grammatical rules designed to give clarity to free expression.

[The decision whether to use the Oxford comma (also called the ‘serial comma’ or the ‘Harvard comma’) and the difference between ‘lie’ and ‘lay’ aren't matters of grammar, strictly speaking.

[Using or omitting the Oxford comma and resolving the ambiguities both choices can engender is a question of rhetorical style, which is concerned with the clarity, logic, and precision of effective communication.

[The ‘lie’/’lay’ confusion is a matter of diction, the selection of precise, appropriate, and effective words to convey a message, influence tone, and suit a specific audience.

[Style, diction, grammar, and other elements of good writing (and speaking) are coequal, but separate.  Though Jovin and the others in this article, as well as the one posted below, have been labeled ‘grammarians,’ but they clearly arbitrate questions in all areas of good writing and speaking.]

Ms. Jovin greeted the audience members and directed them to stacks of worksheets with the “Nonmandatory Grammar Quiz” she had created. (Sample question: “What is the square root of the number of letters in the part of speech that ‘punctiliousness’ is?”)

[‘Punctiliousness’ is a noun, which has four letters. The square root of 4 is 2.  (That is, 4 is the product of 2 multiplied by itself, i.e., 2 x 2 = 4.)

[Curiously, if you answered that ‘punctiliousness’ is a substantive (11 letters) or a nominal (7 letters), you’d be correct.  The math, however, would be complicated, since neither 11 nor 7 has a whole-number square root. In fact, neither is even a rational number, since the decimal fraction that results never ends!]

She was wearing a shirt with rhinestones that spelled out “Grammar Is Groovy,” which she had ordered online at the last minute. “All of my other grammar clothes are not dressy enough,” she said.

A writer and writing instructor who has studied about 25 languages, Ms. Jovin first set out her grammar table on the streets of New York in 2018. Since then, she has written a book, also called “Rebel With a Clause,” which was published in 2022 [Mariner Books].

Mr. Johnson, a 6-foot-6 former pro basketball player and communication skills consultant, loomed amid the crowd. He said that as he witnessed the “humor and humanity” at the grammar table, he was moved to capture it on film. “I saw the fun and the connections,” he said. “It felt like just a beautiful thing that I wanted to share with the world.”

The theater filled up with strangers and friends. Lloyd Rotker and his wife, Judith, had once seen Ms. Jovin speak at a library. “I’m very concerned about grammar,” Mr. Rotker said. “As we lose interest and skills in grammar, we lose clarity in language and eventually in thought.”

Ms. Rotker said she was not as grammatically attuned as her husband, but that he did not often correct her. “That’s why we’re still married,” he said. She nodded. (Their 51st anniversary is later this month.)

Sitting near the front of the theater were Janice and Korey Klostermeier, former neighbors of Ms. Jovin and Mr. Johnson. They had flown in from Miami Beach.

“I love good ol’ grammar,” said Ms. Klostermeier, who quickly added, “That’s O-L-apostrophe.”

The joy among the grammar lovers was occasionally tempered by worry over word choice.

“Can I sneak by?” Taylor Mali, a poet, asked the people sitting on an aisle as he slid past them toward a seat in the center of their row.

“You may,” one of them answered.

[‘Can’/’may’ is a matter of diction again.]

Mr. Mali sighed as he recounted the exchange. “Of all the places,” he said, his head hung low.

The movie opens with an animated discussion in Decatur, Ala., between Ms. Jovin and two men who may or may not have spent a few hours in a bar before sidling up to her grammar table. They wanted her to weigh in on the proper placement of the apostrophe in “y’all.”

The film then takes viewers on Ms. Jovin’s road trip to Detroit; Salt Lake City; Little Rock, Ark.; and beyond. She and Mr. Johnson set up a table covered with dictionaries and usage manuals, and wait for questions.

The action is breezy and lighthearted. At several moments, the audience burst into laughter. When Ms. Jovin professed her love for diagraming sentences, the crowd erupted in applause.

The film also offers instances of surprise, even for some who consider themselves grammatically sharp. On several occasions, Ms. Jovin clarifies a misconception about ending a sentence with a preposition.

To do so is actually perfectly correct, Ms. Jovin explains. “It is a grammatical myth that made its way into English via Latin, but English is a Germanic language,” she tells one table visitor who responds with a delighted “Shut up!”

[I started studying Latin in 8th grade and then learned German some years later. I decided that English grammar had so many exceptions because the Latin grammar system that was being applied to English was being forced on a Germanic language just didn’t quite fit. There were bits left over—so . . . exceptions.]

Audience members filtered into the lobby afterward, checking for news on their phones. While they were watching a film centered on language and civil discussion, President Trump was delivering a sometimes inflaming speech to Congress, during which he faced politicians protesting silently with signs, others groaning and booing, and a heckler, Representative Al Green [D-Texas], who was tossed out.

[Representative Green was removed from the House of Representatives chamber for heckling Trump during his address to a joint session of Congress on 4 March 2025 (the day of the screening). He was later formally censured by the House on 6 March.]

The timeliness of the film’s message was not lost on Kathryn Szoka, who co-owns Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

“She is talking to people, including many who probably have very different views from her own,” Ms. Szoka said of Ms. Jovin. “These are respectful and engaging conversations around our shared values and serve as an illustration of how art and language bring us together.”

[Katherine Rosman covers newsmakers, power players, and individuals making an imprint on New York City for the New York Times.  She joined the Times in 2014 and spent years writing for the Styles section, as well as for the Business pages and Culture desk.  She has also helped cover behind-the-scenes dynamics at the N.F.L.

[In the past year, Rosman has helped report on the tensions playing out in New York City, as they connect to the Israel-Hamas war.  She’s written about James Dolan, owner of Madison Square Garden and the Knicks and one of the most vilified people in New York, and has chronicled free-speech issues at universities.  Rosman has recounted a fight between billionaire Ray Dalio, a hedge fund founder, and millionaire Federico Pignatelli, an Italian prince and owner of Pier59 Studios, over a SoHo pergola and has detailed the end of Geraldo Rivera’s career at Fox News as she tagged along on a boat trip he and his brother took on the Erie Canal.

[Before moving to the Times, Rosman was a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal for a decade.  She’s the author of a memoir about her mother, If You Knew Suzy (Harper, 2010).]

*  *  *  *
“FILMMAKER BRANDT JOHNSON AND
GRAMMAR GURU ELLEN JOVIN
CHAT ABOUT REBEL WITH A CLAUSE, A NEW DOCU-COMEDY
ABOUT ELLEN’S POP-UP GRAMMAR ADVICE STAND
ON A ROAD TRIP ACROSS AMERICA”
by Russell Harper

[The transcript of the conversation below was posted on CMOS Shop Talk (a website of The Chicago Manual of Style, one of the U.S.’s most widely used-style guides) on 25 February 2025.]

Brandt Johnson and Ellen Jovin are cofounders of Syntaxis, a communication skills training firm based in New York City. Ellen, an internationally acclaimed grammar and language expert, is the itinerant grammarian behind the Grammar Table, an informal pop-up advice stand that she launched in 2018 in Manhattan and has since taken to every state in the US. Brandt is the director of the new documentary film Rebel with a Clause. Before this project, he wrote and produced several plays and was the writer, director, and star of Brad Advice, a comedy web series.

Rebel with a Clause follows the adventures of Ellen’s Grammar Table and will have its New York City premiere on March 4 at the SVA [School of Visual Arts] Theatre in Manhattan. A book with the same title was published in 2022. The film is the subject of this exclusive interview with Shop Talk editor Russell Harper.

[The world premiere of the documentary Rebel With a Clause was on 10 January 2025 in Washington, D.C. at the Planet Word Museum, a language arts museum. Following that, the film had a New York City premiere on 4 March 2025, for National Grammar Day.]

Russell: Thank you, Ellen and Brandt, for making a pit stop to talk about this new documentary. Ellen, when CMOS interviewed you in 2022 about your book—which is also called Rebel with a Clause—the film was in postproduction. Or is it a movie?

Ellen: We are glad to be here, Russell—thank you. Either “film” or “movie” is fine. But the film is all Brandt’s doing; I stuck to conjugating things.

Brandt: It’s great to talk to you again, Russell! You can also call it a docu-comedy. It is, above all, meant to entertain.

Russell: Great to talk to both of you again—and to get an opportunity to learn more about your docu-comedy film/movie, which takes us on the road with the Grammar Table. You’ve now been to all fifty states with your grammar advice stand. Do you ever get tired, Ellen, of talking to strangers about grammar?

Ellen: Never. I’d already been talking about grammar for decades when the Grammar Table came into being. I will talk about grammar anytime, anywhere. I guess one thing I might get slightly tired of is people monologuing to me about how no one cares about grammar while I am literally sitting at a grammar advice stand that thousands of people have come up to of their own free will.

Russell: What about you, Brandt? Are you a grammar person also, or is that all Ellen?

Brandt: Ellen put me in the index [to her Grammar Table book] under apostrophes. That’s all I’m going to say.

Ellen: Yeah! The entry is “apostrophes, husband who knows how to use.” Brandt is totally grammarous. He even won the English award in his high school. He is also the one who more than thirty years ago taught me that not everyone pronounces “stalk” and “stock” the same way, which was total news to me. I didn’t believe him and had to go look it up.

Russell: I’ll remember that the next time I need celery stalks for my soup stock. So, which came first, the movie or the book? And did you have an idea of either one the first time you walked out the door and set up the Grammar Table?

Ellen: Absolutely not. I was in search of hedonistic grammar fun. I wanted to spend less time on the computer talking about grammar and more time in the open air talking about grammar. Even though I’d been trying to think of a good angle for a grammar book, for some reason the table didn’t occur to me as a book topic. It wasn’t until table visitors started saying “You should write a book about this!” that it bonked me in the head.

Brandt: When Ellen started out with the Grammar Table, I definitely wasn’t thinking of a movie. But after many hours observing what was happening at the table, just outside our building in New York, I really wanted to share it with a larger audience. I began filming less than three months after the start of the Grammar Table.

Ellen: And then I actually put Brandt’s plan to make a movie in my book proposal.

Russell: How did you pick the locations for the Grammar Table?

Ellen: In New York there are good locations everywhere. Above all, the Grammar Table needs foot traffic. The express subway stop at 72nd and Broadway was perfect, so that’s where I usually went at the beginning.

Brandt: Outside New York, we had to work harder to find pedestrians.

Ellen: The first task was to pick cities. Sometimes weather determined the city. For example, in Ohio we were planning to go to Cleveland, but it was raining, so we went to Toledo instead.

Brandt: In cities we didn’t know, we’d sometimes expect a spot was going to be just right for filming and then arrive and discover it wasn’t great after all. And we were also expelled from a few places. So then I’d maybe have to go off and look for another spot while Ellen stayed with the equipment, table, grammar books, and so on.

Ellen: Preferably in a nice café with excellent cappuccino.

Russell: Once you were set up and ready to film, did the presence of cameras—not to mention of Brandt himself (you played basketball against the Harlem Globetrotters, and you’re about six and a half feet tall, right?)—make it harder to get people to engage and be themselves?

Brandt: I think I look very friendly.

Ellen: Usually that’s true.

Brandt: And I don’t think people minded the camera, or me, very much. The volume of visitors didn’t change after I started filming. It stayed just as high. I had been worried about that—that having cameras would scare people off or alter the conversations—but mostly people seemed just as happy to talk about grammar with cameras as without.

Ellen: Yeah, and you might even have given me an air of professional legitimacy. I looked official with cameras around.

Russell: You’re certainly both Grammar Table pros by now. By the way, thank you for sharing a preview of your movie with me. The book may have the advantage when it comes to all the typographic details, but nothing beats watching it play out in real life. All those spontaneous conversations in the public square about apostrophes and spaces and past participles (not to mention Dutch and French and Tagalog [a language spoken in the Philippines; pronounced tuh-GAH-log]) are often funny and even moving. And the scenery—mountains, haystacks, beaches—also plays a big role. Did you intend from the beginning to make a portrait of America and not just a movie about grammar?

Brandt: It was important to me to let the story emerge as we experienced this road trip and as I edited the film. My intentions at the beginning of all of this were flexible. The US landscape made itself a central part of the story.

Ellen: Brandt is really observant about physical space. He spent hours getting B-roll of things I never noticed. I like seeing beautiful places too, but I’m not observant and can easily get lost just finding my way back from the bathroom.

[B-roll is supplemental or secondary video footage that’s used to enrich the main video (A-roll). It’s what viewers see when the narrator or character keeps speaking, but the visuals cut away to something else—like scenery, hands at work, product close-ups, or contextual action.]

Russell: I remember Brandt running out to get B-roll way back in Providence [in 2019, when I met Brandt and Ellen at the ACES [American Copy Editors Society] conference for copyeditors [sic], where CMOS also had a table]. Is this it for the Grammar Table, or will you be returning to the road at some point?

Ellen: I still go out with the Grammar Table! I love going out with the Grammar Table. My new dream is to get a grammarmobile, just to make roaming around the country a bit easier. We’re car-free Manhattanites.

Brandt: I plan to keep filming as we go around the country screening Rebel with a Clause. I already have my eye on a new camera.

Russell: How can others see Rebel with a Clause, and do you have any plans for a follow-up?

Brandt: We are screening the film in person and virtually for organizations around the country, we’re going to be showing it at festivals, and we are constantly adding new dates on our website.

Ellen: People can sign up for our mailing list if they want to be alerted about screenings. Also on our website is a form you can fill out to bring the film to your organization. We are even going to be showing the film at a boat club soon!

Russell: Will the movie be available for streaming?

Brandt: We don’t have any details about that yet, but we’ll announce them on our website as soon as we do.

Russell: In other words, be sure to check out rebelwithaclause.com for details and updates. In the meantime, thank you so much, Brandt and Ellen, for talking about your film.

Brandt: Thank you, Russell. Don’t forget that you are in the film, in footage from that ACES conference.

Russell: My first cameo! And here you are, almost six years later, with a book and a documentary that brings it all to life. I hope you and the Grammar Table will be around for a long time to come.

Ellen: There’s an awful lot of grammar left to discuss.

[Russell Harper is the editor of The Chicago Manual of Style Online Q&A and was the principal reviser of the 16th, 17th, and 18th editions of The Chicago Manual of Style.  He also contributed to the 8th and 9th editions of Kate L. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.

Here’s a list of the posts on Rick On Theater that are about writing in some aspect or another.  As I said above, most only touch briefly on grammar specifically, but it’s always there in the background. 

    •  “Writing,” 9 April 2010
•  “‘GHOTI’” by Ben Zimmer, 7 December 2011
•  “Why Write?” 4 March 2013
•  “Words on Words,” 1 February 2014
•  “Four Worthies” by Kirk Woodward, 5 January 2016
•  “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In,” 28 July 2015
•  “More Words on Words,” 8 June 2016
•  “Nominalization” by Henry Hitchings, 25 January 2017
•  “Verbification,” 12 August 2018
•  “How I Write,” 25 February 2022
•  “Peter Elbow and Freewriting,” 12 March 2025
•  “Bad Writing,” Parts 1-5, 19, 22, 25, 28, and 31 May 2025
•  “Punctuation” by Sarah Boxer, 29 June 2025
•  “New Word Coinages” by Madison Malone Kircher and Callie Holtermann, 29 July 2025 

[There are also several posts on tangential subjects, including writers, playwriting, reviewing and topics less obviously connected to writing—but ROTters will have to seek those out for themselves.]