Let’s consider again how some of the most common verbs we use work grammatically. In a recent post (Well, Good), we saw that one class of verbs identify their subject with an adjective. Such a verb is called a copula (the word means a rope or link in Latin), and they are very common indeed. …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Well, Good
Most of the rules we hear so much about in studying grammar and writing have to do with ensuring precision, which is the central concern of expository writing, the kind of writing we compose most often to present and explain facts and ideas. It seems to be endemically difficult for us to change our mental …
Learning Another Language
The British author P. L. Travers, famous for her Mary Poppins books, wrote many other works for children and several nonfiction titles as well. Among the latter is her About the Sleeping Beauty, and there, in an afterword appended to her own version of that traditional story, Travers makes this arresting observation about her “love …
Grammar, Etiquette, Culture, and Care
The study of language is not the study of etiquette, anymore than is the study of carpentry or surgery or flight. That is to say, when we study a language, and more particularly its grammar, we should be concerned not so much with how we appear to others, but with understanding the objective structure of …
Listening for a Deeper Tone
I have long looked for a better way to explain a compositional figure writers use to heighten the effect of a phrase, and I think I finally found it the other day in a work by the poet Mary Oliver. First, though, an example to illustrate it. At the close of the first chapter of …