One of the first requirements of a good, solid sentence in English is what is known as subject-verb agreement. Sentences are made up of clauses, clauses of subjects and verbs, and the subject of a clause can be either singular or plural. Right there is what the concept of subject-verb agreement points to, because the …
Author Archives: rultimo
Grammatical Observation
A student of mine is an avid runner and he often sets out along the lakeshore here in Chicago. More than once he has observed how beautifully the light of the sun strikes through the trees along his path, and recently he decided to put together a short paragraph describing the sight. Here is an …
More to Be Said
In a post last week (Finding New Designs), I tried to demonstrate how analyzing a sentence can reveal new ways to revise what we have written. No draft is ever a final draft; what springs from our memory or imagination will take the first sentence pattern that comes to mind, and often that way of …
Finding New Designs
The point of learning how to analyze a sentence is to give ourselves choices in revising our work. Our ideas have to find forms to fit their meaning; change a phrase to a clause, or redesign a complex sentence into a compound one, and what we’re saying appears in a different light with a different …
One Word Too Many
Here’s an interesting sentence that came my way recently, and it poses an opportunity to see how even one unnecessary word can direct a reader’s attention away from the point one wants to make. The writer is addressing a co-worker about issuing a credit to a customer: For invoice #123, the total should have been …