A number of months ago, in a post called Apposition, I took up the question whether commas would be necessary in a sentence like this: My brother, George, is tall. Recently, I was talking with someone who tutors middle school students, and the materials he is compelled to use on the same topic were downright …
Author Archives: rultimo
Due To
I happened to see the other day this notice taped to the front door of a store I was about to enter: Due to local ordinance, anyone entering this establishment must be wearing a mask. Aside from the irony that we now want customers to wear masks when only a few months ago, stores, and …
Closely Reading Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is fittingly famous, both for its philosophical insight and for its crystalline prose. We are with a thoughtful mind when we sit down with it. In this very famous sentence, Thoreau explains why he chose to live for a time alone in the woods: I went to the woods because I …
Two Figures of Speech
Let’s take a look at a sentence that includes two different ways of joining words together. We rightly think of conjunctions as the part of speech that combines words, but how often we use them, or whether we use them at all, contributes to the design and effect of a sentence. Here is a grammatically …
Style and Content
Let’s tackle an interesting sentence that appeared recently in an opinion piece in the New York Times. Its design is grammatically sophisticated, and understanding how and why it’s put together that way can make us more aware of other choices we have in stylizing our own sentences. The author is Ruth Goldway and the piece …