It might be said with some good degree of truth that the best reason to study language closely—and grammar is the foundation of that study—is the habit of awareness it can help instill. To be aware of what’s going on predisposes us to ask questions and look for the reasons behind the circumstances we find …
Author Archives: rultimo
Rain or Shine
If it rains tomorrow, I won’t go to the beach; but if the sun shines, I will. A perfectly good sentence with a perfectly wonderful thing to do in the world if, in fact, the sun shines. But what if someone had put it all this way instead: If it rain tomorrow, I would not …
Present, But Not a Fact
Let’s tackle, or at least try to wrestle to the ground, a slippery topic in English grammar: the conditional sentence. Entire volumes could be (and have been) written on the subject, so here in the space of eight hundred words or so, our goal is just twofold: to get a bird’s eye view of the …
Winning Words
Scott Nearing was a writer, teacher, and social activist whose preoccupations in the last tumultuous century were not too different from our own. Born in 1883 he died in 1983, and in his one hundred years he promulgated economic and political ideas, some far from the commonly accepted, whose consideration depended on his ability to …
Risky Ambiguity
Good writers take good risks from time to time, and when they prevail, they can enrich a sentence with ambiguity without impairing the truth. In a recent opinion piece for the New York Times entitled “This Is Who’s Really Driving the Decline in Interest in Liberal Arts Education,” Jennifer Frey writes this interesting sentence: Over …