If devils are said to lurk in details, then we’re right to expect some subtle troublemaking when we begin to look closely into vocabulary. I was reading a writer online not long ago who was recommending an important but now somewhat forgotten literary critic whose writing, he said, “was notable for its clarity and perspicacity.” …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Understanding
When we say that a style or perspective is classical, what we mean properly is that there is a center around which thoughts, ideas, or figures revolve. The study of logic, or critical thinking, will talk about a universe of discourse, meaning the subject under discussion and the one idea in relation to which all …
Grammatical Impressions
Let’s look at one sentence, take stock of the way it presents its ideas, and then change its structure to see how a different arrangement makes quite a different impression. In the middle of the last century, the publishing firm Barnes and Noble produced a series of what they called Everyday Handbooks, solid titles which …
A Reason for a Rule
A purist is someone who, particularly in matters of language and art, insists on the rules, pressing that they be always observed and always obeyed, even at the expense of being pedantic. The purist and the pedant and the perfectionist forget, however, that our human experience, what we are and what we contrive, is all …
Stable Ideas and Constant Change
The term classical is difficult to define. We think of it often in contrast to romantic, but that too is hard to make clear. The best explanation I have found to understand the two words is by the American literary critic Irving Babbitt in his Rousseau and Romanticism: “A thing is romantic when it is …