Does trouble lay what ahead? That, oddly, would be the right reply to this title question, which I happened to read recently in the news online. The almost traditional difficulty writers seem to have distinguishing between the verbs lay and lie offers steady employment to those watching over the rules of English grammar. It’s possible, …
Author Archives: rultimo
Ruminative Reading
Keeping a commonplace book makes up part of what we can call our private reading, and private reading is so called because it refers to what we read to take care of ourselves—not our work, not someone else’s profits, but our own good wellbeing. Private, though, has many notes and it can mean many things. …
Form Conforming
Our noun rhythm derives from a Greek verb meaning to flow. In literature, we most often associate the idea of rhythm with poetry, whose language is traditionally (but not always) set up in lines of measured cadences which create sound patterns we respond to emotionally—ideally to carry with that emotion its meaning, if not even …
A Galaxy of Ideas
When we have trouble writing the sentence we want, or understanding a sentence someone else has written, the difficulty may lie all the way deep down into the system of language, where subjects and predicates connect with things and thoughts. A basic question we should always be prepared to pose, whether as a critical writer …
Why Keep a Commonplace Book?
A commonplace book is not a journal. A journal is a record of one’s own writing; a commonplace book is a record of someone else’s. It is the transcribing, slowly and inspectingly, of a sentence or passage from our private reading which has arrested our attention, has made us pause to wonder over both what …