When I was in grade school, English class became the Language Arts. None of us really knew why, but many of our parents weren’t happy: just get on with teaching them the basics, they said, so they will know how to read and write. The change, though, may have harbored a defensible reason, and one …
Author Archives: rultimo
The Cumulative Sentence
In an earlier post (Reading Closely), I made mention of what I think is a finely constructed sentence in Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea. Its design is called cumulative, and understanding its construction can help us build our own sentences more thoughtfully. Here is the sentence again: In the quiet of that place …
Revision Work: Correlatives
I asked a student recently to write about something he enjoys doing. He returned with a paragraph on cooking, and here (with his permission) are his final two sentences: Although cooking seems effortless, it is quite challenging. To achieve the right texture, not undercooked or overcooked, not only one needs to manage the timing precisely, …
Reading Closely
I have quoted from the nature writer Rachel Carson before. Here is another passage from her The Edge of the Sea. She is describing a place she knows on the eastern seacoast of the United States: One of my own favorite approaches to a rocky seacoast is by a rough path through an evergreen forest …
Prepositions
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 …