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 …
Author Archives: rultimo
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 …
Definitely Subtle
A student asked me recently if he should write a vendor or the vendor in the second sentence of this passage: Our procedure for registering new vendors has changed. If a vendor has completed Form A, they may receive new orders immediately. A minute question, one might say, and the world will not falter on …
Skeletons in the Clause
We seem to have been blessed or cursed (take which perspective you will) with two opposing forces in our human nature: the creative, which allows all things to be, and the analytical, which examines all comers for their propriety and fitness. We see this in writing, of course, in the two very different frames of …