It is a principle of the classical approach to the art of language that clear thinking produces clear writing. Not everyone believes that. Some maintain that one’s passion for a topic will more powerfully sweep across a reader’s attention to fix an idea, that writing approximately, getting down just the gist, is all that is …
Author Archives: rultimo
First This, Then That
It can be very helpful to understand that the work of writing (or, as it is too often clumsily called, the writing process) is best seen in two parts: drafting and revision. Drafting means filling the blank page or screen with all the ruminations that come to mind when you first cast your attention to …
Wordplay
If it is true that creativity is akin to play, then it should not surprise us, and indeed we should expect, that writers will play with words. We know this game of word play as punning, where we use the same word in different senses in the same context. There are, in fact, many different …
Feeling Meaning
One great benefit of studying grammar can be (or should be) a more subtle awareness of how rich and robust can be the meaning of common perceptions. We look to writers, and perhaps aspire ourselves to be such writers, to see more deeply into things, to bring before us more colorful pictures than the gray …
Grammatical Anatomy
Here is a sentence which illustrates an interesting problem in sentence design. The author is speaking of the frustrations of tourism (soon to be, happily, a problem again), and in a pitch of exasperation, he writes: Everyone is constantly competing, which is extremely stressful, with others to get to the same destinations. Something doesn’t work …