Most of us would agree, I’m sure, that the sentence Me and him saw them yesterday does not conform to the rules of standard English grammar. We can be quick to dismiss such errors, but the instructive question for us in instances like this is why. That simple six-word statement illustrates two features of pronouns …
Author Archives: rultimo
Writing Toward the Specific
In an earlier post (Neater, Lighter, Quicker), we looked at a troublesome first-draft sentence which we improved by paring down its verbs and correcting some punctuation. I did not have space there to explain some other changes made to the sentence and I would like to discuss those here. This was the original sentence: The …
A Passage from Saul Bellow’s The Victim
Before the author Saul Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 for what the Foundation called “the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work,” he had written a novel entitled The Victim, which the critic Lionel Trilling described as “a work of extraordinary achievement” …
Neater, Lighter, Quicker
Let’s look at one sentence very closely to see how it works and doesn’t work. Imagine a psychologist writing about a young patient. The writer is making interesting, indeed moving, observations, but this first draft is overwritten, obstructing the free flow of her sympathetic attention: The argument crystalized and froze the boy’s psychological development which …
Criticizing by Intention
To criticize—in the good sense of the word—means to evaluate something according to its intention. Criticizing is part and parcel of revising a draft composition, and to the degree that no one knows better than we ourselves what we mean to say, we are our own best critics. Often, though, what we’ve written does not …