Poetry has been described as a “concentrated language” whose words are freighted with meaning which the reader must take on and carry back to the idea they arose from. That phrase “concentrated language” belongs to the distinguished literary critic R. P. Blackmur, and he goes on to say that “poems remain obscure until the reader …
Author Archives: rultimo
What’s What
Let’s try to wrestle down an idea about writing which is, I’ll admit from the start, a bit slippery. It begins with an assumption so simple that its implications for composing clear prose can escape us: we think about things. When we have an idea, it’s an idea about something. When we speak to someone, …
Balanced Decisions
It is largely true, I think, that most of us are comma happy—happy, that is, to bisect and trisect our sentences wherever we might hear ourselves taking a breath, either subliminally or aloud. Sometimes that heuristic works and sometimes, with real consequences, it doesn’t. But if we don’t use our ear, what other way is …
Where Writing Can Go
In the best of all worlds, our study of grammar and sentence structure should lead us out of the textbooks and into the precincts of literature and philosophy. All those rules and technicalities are right and good, but they are ultimately instrumental, there to serve a purpose higher than themselves. Without them, of course, we …
Explaining Things
If it is true that in most of what we write we are trying to explain something—a set of facts, our thoughts, our beliefs, it can be helpful to remember that our readers are reading in a certain frame of mind to understand us. When we are explaining something, we are properly appealing to their …