The best analysis finds simplicity at the heart of things: this is really just that. We analyze something not to have merely a thousand fragments, but to discover the system of what we’re looking at, a body of facts organized around a set of principles. That’s true with any science, including the science of grammar. …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Directly What
Last week’s post, The Transitive View, brought this question from a student: “You say that the verb walked in the sentence I walked along the shore is intransitive because it has no direct object. But the subject did something at the shore, so why can’t we say that the noun shore is the direct object …
The Transitive View
Our commonsense view of life tells us that the world is made up of things. There’s me, I, and there’s a world of persons and things that confront me—the natural world of land and sky, the social world of other people, and an abstract world of immaterial ideas. This is the commonsense view the philosophers …
In Defense of All Those Unfamiliar Words
Subject and predicate, form and syntax, nominative, possessive, and objective. The first dragon on the path to learning something new seems ever to be the special terminology that makes up an art or science. It can be greatly to our advantage, though, to be patient in familiarizing ourselves with these strange terms, because they have …
Acting and Being
Here is a short and beautiful passage from Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea, and in reading these masterful sentences closely, we can observe how a good writer prefers more often to tell readers what is going on, rather than simply tell them what is—to prefer, that is, action over being: Now I hear …