The Grammar Table with Ellen Jovin

Ellen Jovin has travelled more than 30,000 miles around the U.S. to address the most pressing — and amusing — grammar questions of our time. And now she’s coming to UIC. Bring your dangling participles, squinting modifiers and ambiguous antecedents to the UIC Quad (East Campus) for Jovin to weigh in.

One day in 2018, Jovin decided she wanted to answer grammar questions on the streets of New York City. Not long after, she walked outside her Manhattan apartment building, unfolded a table next to a subway stop and put up a big sign reading Grammar Table. The questions began immediately and have been flowing in ever since. Commas, apostrophes, participles, prepositions, classroom debates, spousal disputes, strange spellings, dialect differences — Ellen happily tackles them all at her traveling pop-up grammar advice stand. The Grammar Table has been featured on CBS News, The Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR, The Rachel Ray Show, BuzzFeed and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Jovin is a cofounder of Syntaxis, a communication skills training firm, and the author of several books on language, most recently the national bestseller “Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian” (HarperCollins, 2022). Her traveling pop-up grammar advice stand, the Grammar Table, is the basis of that book. Ellen has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in German studies and a master’s degree from UCLA in comparative literature. She has studied 25 languages for fun.

Her visit to UIC is sponsored by UIC English department; School of Literatures, Cultural Studies and Linguistics; and the Institute for the Humanities.