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 …
Author Archives: rultimo
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 …
One Well-Designed Sentence
I came across a sentence recently that illustrates three very common questions about grammar and punctuation. It comes from Lois Lowry’s acclaimed 1993 novel, The Giver, and as you read it, note first how the sentence toggles back and forth between asserting a thought and merely suggesting one. Try to see, that is, the compositional …
One Missing Element
I’d like to look at a sentence which caused some difficulty for a student of mine lately. It involves the word that, or really I should say it involves its absence. We often omit words in our speech and writing to establish a more natural tone, but in analyzing a sentence, we have to restore …
Patience
We do ourselves no favor in believing that learning to write well is something anyone should be able to accomplish quickly and easily. The art of writing, and with it the complementary arts of reading and speaking, requires a habit that the world we’ve made does not promote: patience. To be patient with our work …