Not enough is said, I think, about the importance of regular reading and its practical effect on our writing. The connection between the two comes as a surprise to many of my students: isn’t reading what we do after we’ve written something? In fact, reading is what we should be doing before we write. Because …
Author Archives: rultimo
Life Moves
Here is a beautifully written passage about the ocean coast by Rachel Carson, the pioneering and influential American nature writer. Carson is probably best known for her book Silent Spring, which in the early 1960s was instrumental in bringing attention to widening environmental dangers. The passage here is from her work The Edge of the …
Remarkable
It is remarkable to realize just what language is trying to do. Think about a situation you found yourself in recently, and then think about trying to relate that experience to someone else. Almost any circumstance you can remember involved countless things—all the almost innumerable objects and events and emotions and thoughts that made the …
There’s More To It Than Grammar Alone
One of the things that make writing difficult is that we forget we’re really involved in three projects at once, not just one. When we think about improving our writing, we probably think first of grammar—that’s the subject that has traditionally (or maybe I should say had traditionally) been regarded as the foundation, the dragon …