It's NGD. Yay?

Yep, it's National Grammar Day. This year, the people running it seem to be making an effort to stop it being a celebration of taking people to task, which is good, though I'm not sure it will catch on. But even they have ... um, errors on their site. Like this:

6. Passive voice is always wrong. Wrong! Passive voice is when you don't name the person who's responsible for the action. An example is the sentence "Mistakes were made," because it doesn't say who made the mistakes. If you don't know who is responsible for an action, passive voice can be the best choice.

No. You can totally name "person responsible" in passive. To use their sentence, "Mistakes were made by them." And you can totally avoid naming the responsible people and still be in active voice, as in "The bus blew up" or the more obvious "somebody made a mistake and blew up the bus." Not naming the "person responsible" is not what the passive is about. (The virtues of the passive voice are covered in this old post of mine.)

I got asked a "grammar question" at work. It was about how to punctuate these sentences:

Have you ever said "My name is John!"?
Have you ever asked, "Is your name John?"
I asked, "Is your name John?" and all I got was a dirty look.

The third one can, according to some style guides, have a comma after the question, or, according to others, no comma at all.

See, that's the thing ... that's not grammar. That's style. It varies depending on which guide you use (this is Chicago). Grammar's a fascinating thing, but with very few exceptions punctuation isn't part of it. Nor is whether or not you say "Hopefully" as a sentence adverb, or split an infinitive, or use "only" with wide scope. Most of the people who carry on about "grammar" don't even know what it really is; to them, it's a cover term for, at best, "using Standard Modern English," and at worst "following all the little 'rules' I was taught, no matter how groundless or contradictory." Forgive me if I don't join in...

If you want some good grammar-related linguistics to celebrate the day, though, allow me to point you at Gabe Doyle's post, and Neal Whitman's set of posts.