About the only tools necessary to practice the art of writing are paper and pencil or screen and keyboard. That’s the romantic view, at least. A more realistic perspective would include at least a dictionary, but even then we don’t often realize just what practical information a lexical entry can give us as writers and …
Author Archives: rultimo
Where Grammar Meets Logic
Here is an example of a grammatical construction I have seen a number of times recently in professional writing. It’s unusual, but apparently not as uncommon as I had thought. Try to identify the subject and its verb in this sentence: He coming home from work so late worries me. What is it, we wonder, …
Due To All Those Words
We’ve looked in the past at the dubious phrase due to, but a few remarks here again about its stylistic effects might be in order. What are we to think, for example, about a sentence like this: Due to my sister’s condo’s rules not allowing dogs any longer, she is presently confused about if she …
What Are We Seeing?
A student brought to me recently two sentences from Haruki Murakami’s short story “The Seventh Man.” He was unclear, he said, why the author would use the plural noun waves in one sentence and then the singular noun wave in another, when both sentences had to do with the same scene, two boys looking out …
But What’s the Subject?
There are two questions fundamental to almost every sentence we write: what are we talking about? and what are we saying about it? These two questions will keep us thinking clearly, and thinking clearly is the first requirement of writing clearly. Simple enough, right? We write about what we perceive, whether in the world or …