A good share of our communicating with one another is made up of asking questions. What time is it? Is that the house over there? Did you call the owner? You have some information I would like to have, and I can request it from you by changing the way I organize my sentences. But …
Author Archives: rultimo
Riding the Rapids
If you stay looking at language long enough, you can turn yourself into a philosopher of sorts. And that’s a good thing, because at its best, philosophy tries to get behind how something just appears. It wants to find out what’s really going on, to unconfuse us by helping us be sure that what we …
Upcoming Seminar
Swimming and Swimming: Words Ending in -Ing. Tuesday, December 22 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. CT What is the difference between a swimming coach and a swimming coach? Quite a lot, actually, from a grammatical point of view. Writing Smartly’s next seminar on Tuesday, December 22, will explain the difference between a present participle and a …
Changing Perspectives
What makes language so compelling a study is the insight it can give into how we perceive what is going on around us. Our human nature seems to be given over to the idea that how things seem to be is how things really are, and we are prone to forgetting that the same event …
Seeing What Choices We Have
Writing is not an easy affair for most of us. There are some few, of course, from whom sentences fall like water over a cliff, but for many of us (and I think most), the struggle to put our thoughts into words is not a chance we jump at. This is why it is important …