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 …
Author Archives: rultimo
Energetic Detail
Appreciate for a moment the extravagant detail, or what we could call the involvement, of this description of a character in Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Flowering Judas.” This is Braggioni, who waits every evening for Laura, to sing for her with his guitar: Braggioni catches her glance solidly as if he had been waiting …
What Literature Might Do For Us
Actors will talk about breaking the fourth wall, by which they mean disregarding the imaginative belief that their character is living and moving within its own world, and that we the audience are watching it all from a point outside that dramatic stage world. It’s an odd notion to think about, needing the sophisticated agreements …
Plain Language
Writers and writing teachers will often refer to something called plain language, by which they mean to point to the incontestable virtue of saying clearly and plainly what one means to say. To be described as a plainspoken person is still, even now, a compliment most of us would be pleased to own. Such a …
Omniscient AI?
What are we to do about this? A friend of mine who tutors high school students recently consulted AI (an acronym we now seem to be accepting as a proper noun) about the correct use of pronouns in a sentence like this: He calls her more often than me. The word than, he was told, …