Let’s take a look at a sentence that includes two different ways of joining words together. We rightly think of conjunctions as the part of speech that combines words, but how often we use them, or whether we use them at all, contributes to the design and effect of a sentence. Here is a grammatically …
Author Archives: rultimo
Style and Content
Let’s tackle an interesting sentence that appeared recently in an opinion piece in the New York Times. Its design is grammatically sophisticated, and understanding how and why it’s put together that way can make us more aware of other choices we have in stylizing our own sentences. The author is Ruth Goldway and the piece …
Clause by Clause
What are we to do with a sentence like this: You were sitting next to the person whom everybody thinks will be the next president of the corporation. Or is it who everybody thinks? It’s a perfect example of how practically important it can be to train your eye to see clauses first when grammatical …
Writers Read
One of the reasons it is so important to set up and maintain a regular routine of reading is that we have to put ourselves in front of—see and examine and estimate—the language that good writers write. Without models, it is terribly difficult, if not ultimately impossible, to achieve what we aspire to; with models, …
Take a Stand
To think about language is to think about thinking, and the only qualification that pronouncement needs is that by language we mean prose, not poetry. Poetry is the work of our intuition, but prose is our everyday language, the way we speak and write to accomplish our day’s work and pleasure. The term prose originates …