Bonus. Rob Meyerson and Dan Misdea return for a bonus segment! They share their tips for solving tricky gramograms and recommend their favorite books for word lovers, artists, and writers.
Bonus. Rob Meyerson and Dan Misdea return for a bonus segment! They share their tips for solving tricky gramograms and recommend their favorite books for word lovers, artists, and writers.
🔗 Share your familect recording in a WhatsApp chat.
🔗 Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.
🔗 Subscribe to the newsletter.
🔗 Take our advertising survey.Â
🔗 Get the edited transcript.
🔗 Get Grammar Girl books.Â
🔗 Join Grammarpalooza. Get ad-free and bonus episodes at Apple Podcasts or Subtext. Learn more about the difference.Â
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475).
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
| Grammar Girl Social MediaÂ
| Links: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook.Threads. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon. Bluesky.
MIGNON: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. This is your bonus segment about AB@C, a fabulous book of gramograms by Dan Misdea and Rob Meyerson. Dan and Rob, thank you so much for being here.
ROB: Thank you.
DAN: Thank you.
MIGNON: Yeah, so, you know, as we said in the main segment, these are based on the work of William Steig, who sort of originated the Grammar gramogram format, and you guys are just sort of in awe of him and the amazing work that he did, and you're continuing it now in your book. You know, there are people like me who are really bad at solving these word puzzles, and you told me you might have some tips for me.
ROB: Yeah, sure. First off, if it gives you any comfort, it's become clear to me that being great at solving word puzzles like crossword puzzles and other kinds of classic forms of word puzzles doesn't necessarily translate into being good at solving gramograms. It seems to me like what maybe dictates your ability to solve them partly is whether you have a good ear for things like language and accents and music, because really what you have to be able to do is
dissociate the letters that you're seeing and the way things are spelled from the way things actually sound. So noticing things like "A plus M" for "Adam," that the word, the name "Adam" and "the atom," the thing, the part of a molecule, that those are actually pronounced identically by most English speakers, even though they're spelled very differently, that can be tough for people to have that sort of mental flexibility think when they're looking at these.
So, a few tips: First, just make sure you're not reading, making sure you're not pronouncing them the way you would when reading a word; that you're actually just saying the letters, numbers, and symbols out loud by their names. Try it again and play with pacing, emphasis, and inflection because we can't tell you how to emphasize things just by writing the gramogram, so you have to sometimes try different things. One that I found really effective, a tip is to read it out loud to somebody else because they won't be burdened by seeing the symbols on the page.
They'll just hear what you're saying. And so you create that separation automatically by reading out loud or having somebody else try to read it out loud to you. And then obviously, really lean on the drawing if you can. You mentioned a few during the episode where Dan's drawing helped you solve it.
Sometimes those have more clues in them than you might expect at first glance. Yeah, compare the gramogram and the drawing and see if it helps you solve it.
MIGNON: Yeah, I mean, license plates don't have those illustrations, but I loved your idea of hiring Dan to make a custom sticker for your car that can explain your license plate.
DAN: Yeah. I'll send you a quote.
MIGNON: That's a great idea. You know, it just popped into my head. I've been interested. I've been trying to learn more about reading and literacy. And, you know, I've come to understand that teaching phonetics is really important to help kids learn to read and, you know, associating letters with sounds and things like that.
And so you're talking about almost doing something differently from that when you're trying to interpret the gramograms or associating different sounds with the letters than what you're used to seeing. I imagine you don't know this, but is there any research that shows how gramograms relate to reading or even if people who have dyslexia have a harder time with them?
ROB: Do you want to weigh in on that?
DAN: Yeah, I guess there's no proof of that, but it could. If anyone finds or discovers that when reading our book or just looking through gramograms, we would love to know. That's great to push if...
ROB: I mentioned that my mom was a children's librarian, and she's talked to me about this a little bit. Not empirical research, but her theory is that it could help in that it could just give some kids confidence if they're having trouble with reading, but they're able to read these gramograms, able to solve these gramograms, which I do think could be a lot easier for young kids than sounding out words.
I think confidence can go a really long way, and so it could be a really nice way of giving a kid a book that they can read and maybe they haven't found one like that yet, that they can have fun with on their own, that may not be a B at C because some of them are, as we've mentioned, some of them are really hard.
But gramograms in general could be a fun way to get a kid interested in looking at a book, whereas they might not be otherwise if they find them intimidating.
MIGNON: It's turning reading into a different kind of game that maybe could be a little more fun than trying to sound out, you know, hard words or something like that.
ROB: Right.
MIGNON: Yeah. Interesting. Well, you know, this part of the show, the bonus segment, I'd like to get your book recommendations because we have so many different and interesting guests.
So, you know, just. You know, a book that, a few books if you could recommend that, something you'd recommend to a friend, you know, that you've read lately or, I don't know, even in the past that, you know, you think is a book that, that other people would like to, that you loved.
ROB: Dan, you go first. No, you want me to
DAN: No, I got it. I guess the first one. Which, this book had a huge impact on my career and everything is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. And it's basically a handbook for anyone in a creative field that helps fight their creative demons, find their muse, find a creative process, and really take on the mindset of a professional writer or artist, or even entrepreneur.
The other one is probably Forces of Nature by Ed Steed. A little bit of lighter reading. It's just a collection of cartoons by the New Yorker cartoonist, Ed Steed. And his work is incredible. He's on the level of William Steig, modern-day Steig in many ways. And then the third is probably A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley.
It's a novel, semi-autobiographical, and it highlights the ups and downs of a struggling writer who battles like failure and love lost, and he's obsessed with fame and the New York Giants of all things. There's a lot of dark humor and a lot of lessons learned through it.
And someone in a creative field would certainly relate to it and to some capacity.
MIGNON: Those really
DAN: Are my three.
MIGNON: Awesome. Thanks, Dan. Rob, how about you?
ROB: Yeah. So we knew you were going to ask this. So I thought about books that might be especially interesting for your listeners. And these are some of my favorites, but I work with words for a living, so I actually do sometimes read books about words, as I'm sure you do, Mignon.
And one of my favorites is Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer. It's just, I think, just three or four years old. And he has such a sort of dry sense of humor that he's able to make a book about grammar and punctuation and words and etymology actually pretty funny and interesting. And it sits on my shelf, and I actually refer to it as well as a reference.
Sometimes when I'm trying to remember what he recommends about whether to put an apostrophe between the numbers and the S in the ‘90s or the ‘80s and things like that, these things that I just, I feel like I should know, but I just sometimes forget. So that's a great one.
Another word-related book that I read decades ago is called Word Freak.
MIGNON: Mm hmm.
ROB: The title may not give it away immediately, but it's about the world of competitive Scrabble, which is a fascinating world that I did not know existed. I'd grown up playing Scrabble casually with my family, but I didn't realize that back then that there were people that
actually compete on the international level at this game and how seriously they take it, that they can memorize all these words and things like that. So that was fascinating.
MIGNON: Yeah. I want to jump in. That's a great, it's a great book. And I had a chance years ago to go to a competitive Scrabble tournament. I have a two-part episode about that from many years ago. So if you're interested, look in the feed; it was probably, I don't know, eight or ten years ago.
ROB: Yeah. Yeah. The funny thing is, the author is, I believe, he was a sports writer. And so he approaches it with that lens, but then it becomes—it's nonfiction, obviously—but he was writing about it. But then it becomes somewhat autobiographical because he becomes obsessed and starts competing himself.
And so it's really got this kind of interesting arc where, by the end of the book, he's in these competitions, and he's on the New York subway, memorizing lists of two-letter and three-letter words and things like that. Yeah, that was fun to read. And then lastly, on a more personal level, I love mystery novels and hardboiled detective fiction.
And so I have to give a shout-out to Raymond Chandler, who's one of the originators of the form. And I'll make it language relevant because one of my favorite things about him is what people have called Chandler-isms, which are his little metaphors and quips that really define the genre almost.
And you'll hear Humphrey Bogart saying them in the movie versions of Chandler's books. But he has just such a way with words—so funny—and is able to convey so much meaning through a short metaphor that it's inspiring, I think, for anyone who works with words.
MIGNON: Wonderful. Well, thanks for giving extra thought to what the audience might enjoy in particular. That's very nice of you. Well, Dan Meyerson and no, that's very nice of you. So Rob Meyerson and Dan Misdea, again, authors and illustrators of AB@C, this fabulous book of grammar grams. Thank you so much for being here.
ROB: Thanks for having us. It was really fun.
DAN: Yeah, thank you.
MIGNON: You bet. And then, oh, and I should say, you bet. And where can people find out more about each of you?
ROB: So the best place to go for starters is gramograms.com, a site that we were able to create to give a little more information about gramograms and ourselves in the book. But for me, you can find me on social media, on most channels, just at Rob Meyerson. And then my work site is heirloomagency.com. So that's mostly more work-related, but you can learn a little bit more about me and other books that I've worked on there.
MIGNON: And Dan?
DAN: Yeah, you could find me on Instagram where I post cartoons and gramograms and stuff. It's at Dan_Misdea. And, I also have a biweekly comic panel on comicskingdom.com called TBD, which stands for Toons by Dan.Â
MIGNON: Nice. Okay, well, thanks again for being here.
ROB: Thank you.
DAN: Of course. Thanks.