In the interest of seeing more precisely how language works from the inside out, let’s look at this sentence I happened to read the other day: But for reason, we humans are merely animals. We generally think of tone as a notion applying to the entirety of a piece of writing—essay, novel, poem, but an …
Author Archives: rultimo
But That
It may help to remind ourselves from time to time that grammar can help to make us not only better writers, but more discerning readers as well. When it comes time, for example, to read outside our contemporary world, putting ourselves in another time and place to see the world from another angle, we can …
Myself or Me?
Which of these sentences is grammatically correct: When you’ve finished the report, email a copy to Tom and myself, or When you’ve finished the report, email a copy to Tom and me. What is the difference, in other words, between myself and me in a sentence like this? Both myself and me are pronouns, and …
Grammatical Person and Number and Case
What is the grammatical difference between I and me or we and us? Or I and my or we and our? All of these forms (and many more) have to do with what is called grammatical person and number. We are all familiar with the forms, but perhaps not with the topic to the degree …
Simplicity
The best analysis finds simplicity at the heart of things: this is really just that. We analyze something not to have merely a thousand fragments, but to discover the system of what we’re looking at, a body of facts organized around a set of principles. That’s true with any science, including the science of grammar. …