If so much of writing is about striking the right relationship between author and subject, then we can’t neglect thinking about how we shape and punctuate our sentences. To be related means to be connected, to be tied in some way to someone or something else in a situation. A relationship has to do with …
Author Archives: rultimo
Changing Voices
We forget sometimes, I think, how changeable we are, how many personalities we present through the day. It may be that we should aspire to concentrate and focus those many dispositions we have, but our daily life is made up of relationships with others who call out from us certain tendencies, and we respond in …
Lines of Investigation
A headline recently at CNN to promote a new podcast read, the most famous crime you may have never heard of. This innocent little statement gives us the chance to review a number of points that bear on both grammar and style. We should begin by noting that what we’re looking at is a fragment, …
Moving Words Around
Discussions about sentence design and stylistic effects can risk giving the impression that these are matters only for imaginative literature, not for language in its workaday character. Here’s an example of an interestingly constructed sentence in an ordinary (by which I do not mean undistinguished) college textbook on critical thinking of some years ago. At …
Where Things Stand
Rearranging what we’ve written makes up a large part of revising our work. Grammarians refer to what is called syntax, the arrangement of words across a sentence to produce meaning. Change the syntax and we change the meaning, or at least the angle from which the reader sees what we’re saying. So there’s some reason …