Verbs of State Tuesday, March 23 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. CT Consider these two sentences: He was angry. He pounded the table. We clearly see an action in the second sentence, but is there any action in the first? Verbs express action, but they also express what is called state of being. The next Writing …
Author Archives: rultimo
But
To begin with, let’s shake the dust out of the curtains fast and furious: it is right and proper and historically justifiable to begin a sentence with but. And to begin a sentence with and. But that does not mean one should act with abandon in doing either. Both words are conjunctions, and what will …
Verbs of Action
Today’s post begins a series of English grammar lessons that will present over the next few months an orderly review of the major topics important to better writing and speaking. These will coordinate with the Tuesday evening seminars, now called Tuesday Evening Grammar, so if a particular morning post addresses a topic you have been …
Tuesday Evening Grammar
Verbs of Action Tuesday, March 16 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. CT Writing Smartly begins a new series on March 16 called Tuesday Evening Grammar. As with our previous seminars, each week we will discuss an important topic of English grammar relevant to better writing, but the subjects will now move systematically, covering more basic ground …
Lab Work
Grammar can be a difficult sermon to preach sometimes, even to the choir. There’s lot of it, its intricacies can seem hairsplitting, and those two qualities alone conspire at times to convince us that it all might just be irrelevant anyway. But the rationale for thinking so much about grammatical structure is that the form …