Mark your calendars now and make plans to attend the 2026 NCRA Conference & Expo taking place July 16-18 in Bellevue, Wash. You won’t want to miss this year’s keynote speaker, Ellen Jovin, the nationally recognized grammar guru who is a bestselling author and creator of the Grammar Table.
Jovin, cofounder of Syntaxis, a communication skills training firm, is also the author of several books on language, most recently the national bestseller “Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian,” published in 2022. The book is based on her experiences from taking her pop-up advice stand, Grammar Table, on a cross country tour.
Jovin’s idea for the pop-up Grammar Table took hold in 2018 when she decided she wanted to answer grammar questions on the streets of New York City. She followed up by setting up a table outside of her Manhattan apartment building near a subway stop and put up a sign reading “Grammar Table.”
According to Jovin, the questions began immediately and have ranged in topics from commas, apostrophes, participles, prepositions, classroom debates, spousal disputes, strange spellings, dialect differences, and more. In particular, she said, she learned that the Oxford comma is an American obsession.
Jovin said she has long been wanting to address NCRA members after she held a remote session for a state conference of court reporters. That prompted her to first reach out to NCRA in 2021 to request a copy of the Association’s style guide. She was also fortunate to watch the 2015 documentary film “For the Record,” directed by SimplySteno instructor Marc Greenberg, CRI, which explores the world of court reporters and stenography, and realized there is a strong kinship between herself and stenographers and their love of details.
Jovin, who holds a B.A. from Harvard College in German studies and an M.A. from UCLA in comparative literature, is also the author of several other grammar- and language-related books and has studied twenty-five languages for fun.
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