It’s always a good time to review the basics of sentence construction, and so to do that, let’s look at this curt and curious sentence: Leave the light on until we leave. There’s no high philosophy in that statement, but there’s still quite a lot going on grammatically. What are the steps we should take …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Clarifying Commas
What are we to make of a sentence like this: My father and his friend went shopping yesterday and he bought a new phone. The problem, of course, is that we don’t know who bought the phone, father or friend. We can restructure the sentence entirely (My father bought a new phone when he went …
Choices and Their Effects
The American novelist Tim O’Brien wrote a short story entitled “On the Rainy River,” a poignant tale of a young man (the narrator is O’Brien himself) who receives a draft notice shortly after graduating high school during the Vietnam War. I would like to look at two of O’Brien’s sentences in that story (I read …
Which What?
What’s going on in a sentence like this: He explained as best he could why he was late yet again, which in the end was not enough to save his job. We can understand easily enough that the statement is communicating two ideas, but how those ideas are connected through the word which might strike …
In Anticipation of—Something
The American writer and translator Lydia Davis wrote a short and what I can only describe as haunting little story called “Television,” and in it she composed a sentence worth our examining for its style and structure (Davis’s tale appears in The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, selected by Joyce Carol Oates and …