Most of us are confident with the idea that nouns name things (tree, freedom) and verbs indicate an action (throw, walk) or a state of being (is, were). But what do prepositions do? Some say that prepositions (along with conjunctions, if truth be told) are the slipperiest of the eight parts of speech. They are …
Author Archives: rultimo
Wrote or Has Written?
Many years ago, a friend of mine had a particularly unpleasant experience on a flight to Europe. She wrote the airline a letter, and they made amends by sending her a voucher for a free flight in the future. The question for us is, why did I just use the verb wrote in the last …
Running On and On
What does it mean, really, to think clearly? It’s an important question because writing and thinking are so closely associated. To ask what thinking clearly means is also to ask what writing clearly means. If we confine our discussion here to expository prose—the explanatory composition most of us undertake most of the time in emails …
Designing by Groups of Three
There are usually many paths up the same mountain and rarely only one way of doing things. Some will say that rules and measures weaken our creativity as we write, and others maintain that ignoring the rules of grammar and composition will produce only anarchy (what a teacher of mine once derisively referred to as …
Writing Is Designing
We agree, I hope, that writers work in words. Words are the writer’s raw material, and like the sculptor’s clay, words have to be shaped into meaning. Choosing words and arranging them is the sum and substance of the practice of writing. This is why some of the fine old grammars of English said that …