The first day of spring this year is March 20, and between now and then there’s time for us to read some shorts stories and relearn some skills in language and writing. Here’s a short course and a new series of very short instructive talks on English grammar—all as the days slowly but surely get …
Continue reading “An Upcoming Short Course
and a New Very Short Series”
I was on a flight recently, and when it came time for the beverage cart to come down the aisle, the flight attendant asked the passengers in the row ahead of me, “Would you like something to drink?” The person on her left answered, “Black coffee,” and a few moments later the person on her …
In a recent post (Some Things Are More Important), we looked at this sentence as an example of a subordinated construction: He thought that his client, who, he believed, was not being entirely forthright, would not fare well on appeal. In commenting on the relative clause who was not being entirely forthright, I explained only …
From time to time, and again as recently as just this past week, readers of the Writing Smartly posts will ask how to go about studying the essays more systematically. This being the first post of the new year, I thought it might be a good idea to present a plan of study through some—not …
Human experience is such that, if we regarded everything—every thought, every action, every moment—of equal importance, our lives would flatten into an unbearable monotony: quality and worth and value would evaporate, as would the impetus to do anything other than what we’re doing at the moment, because whatever we would choose would be no better …
