Author Archives: rultimo

We seem to have been blessed or cursed (take which perspective you will) with two opposing forces in our human nature: the creative, which allows all things to be, and the analytical, which examines all comers for their propriety and fitness. We see this in writing, of course, in the two very different frames of […]

Would you retain the comma in this sentence: the president called the protesters, terrorists? The statement has some obvious heat underneath it, and we often justify a comma we include by saying that it is emphasizing the word it isolates. But if we let emotion overtop the bounds of grammar (in prose, at least, for […]

One would be hard put to find just about anywhere an English grammar or composition textbook that did not take up the topic of what is called the passive voice of a verb. We are warned regularly and rightly to prefer the active to the passive, but as with all such exhortations, there are consequential […]

As I mentioned recently in two earlier posts (In a Contrary Mood and It’s Inevitable), understanding conditional sentences can make us more sharply aware of just how one thing may follow from another. Real conditions mean if this is true, then that is true, and contrary-to-fact conditions mean if this were true (but it’s not), […]

I was in line at the grocery store the other day and I happened to overhear the person behind me say to someone on the phone, if I can help you, I will. The resolve and companionship of the pledge moved me, and later I wondered how very different my reaction could have been with […]