The point of theory is practice. When we’re trying to learn how to do something better, like revising what we’ve written, for example, the more we understand the rules of the game, the better we can control the board. And in the triathlon of language, that theory includes instruction about where to place pronouns in …
Author Archives: rultimo
Practical Reading and Writing
I was speaking the other day with an older friend I hadn’t seen in a while, and he asked me what I was reading lately. I mentioned this and that, and then asked him the same question. He said he was getting interested in philosophy—not the kind of thing professors in the universities talk about, …
My Florida Home
If an acquaintance happened to mention to you casually one day that my house in Florida needs a new roof, you would be right to wonder just how many homes he in fact has. You would be right, that is, to infer that he had at least one other home, but what about the sentence …
Logically or Poetically?
It is possible to think about the way we write and speak as the way we see the world. After all, we write and speak about something, and whether it’s ultimately true that there is an independent and real and lasting world outside our own minds (our commonsense notion which, surprisingly, not everyone has always …
More Than One Is Sometimes One
An early obstacle one comes up against on the road of grammar and style is the towering habit English has of using a string of words as one part of speech. The science of grammar, as opposed to its art, is meant to give us the rationale by which to revise skillfully what we have …