The traditional study of the language arts finds its justification in the belief that self-reflection is the special characteristic of human beings, and that this ability to recognize oneself as a person is possible—or even begins to be possible—through the cultivated use of language. One department of language study is called etymology, and under that …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Separate But Connected
Here’s another chance to sharpen our grammatical tools. Is this sentence correct: he is one of those persons, who is always on time. We will need either two knives or one double-edged sword to examine this deceptively simple sentence, one blade for grammar and the other for punctuation. When we revise our work, we should …
Governing Whom
To keep our technical skills sharp, let’s look at a sentence which presents a second-order grammatical question. We know that every preposition has an object, and when that object is a pronoun, it often assumes a unique form, because some pronouns vary their spelling to indicate their grammatical function. This change in spelling (or position) …
The Precise Truth
If a dictionary defines words, what does a thesaurus do? The word means treasury in Latin, and the basic answer, of course, is that a thesaurus synonymizes, that is, it suggests words close in meaning to one another. Some thesauri merely list groups of related words, others discern the subtle shades of meaning between them. …
To Persuade Is Not Enough
In the study of language, a distinction is made between persuading and convincing. To persuade someone is to induce one to act, whether physically to do something or mentally to believe something. To convince, on the other hand, is to show the reasons something should or should not be acted upon. In the traditional scheme …