Abstractitis is a term of art in the study and practice of writing, and it refers to what we might call literary inflammation, sentences whose meaning is constricted because they are so swollen with abstract nouns. Here’s an example: Last month a department management process evaluation analysis was submitted by district administration. This, we should …
Author Archives: rultimo
Chattering Time Away
Frank O’Connor was a prolific Irish author of the twentieth century. He wrote a great number of short stories, one of which is entitled My Oedipus Complex. This curious tale of mother, father, and son includes a sentence which gives us a chance to review not a phenomenon of Freudian psychology, but an equally curious …
Looking Under the Hood
Revising closely means looking for questionable choices in both grammar and rhetoric, including how we have designed and punctuated some of our sentences in a draft. Here’s a passage that illustrates both an objective punctuation error and an arguably lesser sentence design. Can you find each of them? For weeks he talked to me about …
Comma, Colon, and Semicolon
The point of punctuation is to organize and regulate—to organize our thoughts and regulate their pace so that our readers can flow along with our ideas as we present them. A period, we know, marks the end of a declarative sentence, but what do three other common marks of punctuation—the comma, colon, and semicolon—do? Here …
To Be or To Be Something
The novelist John Steinbeck wrote a short story called Flight, and in it Mama Torres, the matriarch of a farm below Monterey, sends her young son to the city for medicine and salt. “I would not send thee now alone, thou little one,” she tells him, “except for the medicine…. It is not good to …