Perhaps along with other American Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson is not a writer whose paragraphs are considered models of structured composition. His sentences, though, are another matter. Robert Richardson, in his First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process, declares that “for Emerson the sentence—not the paragraph and not the essay—is the …
Author Archives: rultimo
The Unity of Garden Design
Handbooks on writing, particularly traditional ones explaining expository prose, will often say that a final document is just an assemblage of individual paragraphs. In the same way that a sentence puts words together to build a thought, so a paragraph puts sentences together to ramify a number of such sentence-thoughts. By definition, each paragraph is …
Not by Accident, By Thought
The word seems to have gotten out that writing is just a lot like talking: we should be able to do it without much thinking, and if we can’t, then we should try to write as we speak. Something, let’s hope, will come together. That is a grand illusion, and if we follow that assumption, …
Thinking Through
What does it mean to think something through? If I have a list of expenses I need to total for the month, thinking about that problem means gathering the relevant data and adding each accurately to the next. This kind of thinking we call calculating or computing, finding the always and necessary connection of facts, …
Piety and Care
Thomas Mann’s bizarre but mythic short story The Transposed Heads retells an Indian legend treating the intricately riddling questions of identity: who am I, who are you, who are we together? A young couple and a friend are on their way home (in more ways than one), and passing a temple in the countryside, one …