Reviewing the Basics

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 …

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 …

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 …