What are we after when we want to write a well-crafted paragraph? Cynically we might answer, just to get it done!, but when we have something we really want to say to the world, we inevitably care about how well we say it: we want to be taken seriously and we don’t want to be …
Author Archives: rultimo
Seeing How It’s Done
Whether you understand much or little of what the following sentence by the art historian Herbert Read is saying will scarcely matter for our grammatical purposes here. What concerns us is the shape, or construction, of this architectural sentence, understanding which can make us both more sophisticated readers and acute thinkers. Read is prefacing here …
What is a Simile—and Why?
It seems to be agreed by those who know that what we call thinking is a kind of comparing. When we think, we are trying to understand what something is, to consider how it may be like or unlike something else we already know. And in thinking about a larger problem involving many things, we …
A Reasonable Culture
There are, in the end, matters more profound than culture, but every civilized community must yet possess some set of principles to last. What we think of as a people’s culture was originally a shared object of worship (we can sense that meaning still in our word cult), but we use the word now to …
Short Course Announcement
Beginning Monday evening, February 9, from 6:00 to 7:00 CT, Writing Smartly will offer again its four-week online short course entitled Reading Closely to Write. Each week we will examine the structure and stylistic design of sentences from one short story (each averaging about 15 pages) written by a celebrated author. We will analyze the …