Writers know the value of small things. What many of us might think to be inconsequential detail—a comma here or a few words there, for example—can make all the difference in reproducing the mental picture we give to someone else to see what we have perceived and felt. A student of mine recently wrote a …
Author Archives: rultimo
A Perfect Future
In a recent post (What Happened When), we looked at the difference between the simple past and present perfect tenses. We saw that the simple past points to the occurrence of an action, and the present perfect to an occurrence and its consequences. So we say that the sun rose versus the sun has risen, …
What Happened When?
There is, we can all agree, a yesterday, a today, and a tomorrow—so says, at least, our instinctive human intuition about life in the world. Many languages, and certainly English, are not satisfied, though, with this simple triple structure of time, and so the grammatical concept of tense can be at times confusing if not …
Him Who or He Who?
Here’s what almost all of us do when we read a sentence whose grammar just doesn’t seem quite right: we read the sentence aloud again, ask ourselves if it sounds right, then maybe tilt our head and read it still one more time, and finally come to the conclusion that we’re just not sure—or worse, …
Overruled
I was taken to task last week for a mistake I apparently made in a recent post. I had written the question So how apply all that theory to our example? to make a transition to a new paragraph, and the objection was raised (I’ll keep the agent unknown with that passive construction) that so …