Should I be reluctant or reticent to spend my savings on a new car? Am I reticent or recalcitrant to talk about a friend’s personal problems? The strength of writing what is called expository prose—the kind of writing about facts that most of us do most of the time—lies in making precise distinctions, and that …
Author Archives: rultimo
It’s Like When
On your desk (or desktop) you have a dictionary and next to it you have (don’t admit it if you don’t) a style guide. Knowing the definition of a word is one thing; knowing how to use two similar words, or punctuate phrase and clauses, or build more sophisticated sentences accurately is very much another. …
Finding the Subject
When we begin to look more closely at the sentences we read and write, it can often be more difficult than we might think to identify the subject of a statement. A first course in grammar will explain that the subject is what the sentence is about, but that can be confusing because more often …
A Grammatical Exchange
Let’s look at the language of a casual exchange between two managers about an employee who is regularly late to work. Having been told about the problem, one manager says, I’ll talk with him when he gets in, and the other replies, Yeah, well, when he gets in is just the question. Both sentences work …
What, Really, Is an Adjective?
Not-so-fond memories of our school days might remind us that adjectives describe things. That’s true, but like so much of what we learned about grammar in our early days, more could be said, and that more could make the whole subject of language and composition a lot more interesting. I had occasion the other day …