Word study plays an important part in the craft of writing. What, after all, are we writing with but words? When we say that someone has a rich vocabulary, we mean that they have at hand the tools to make distinctions that would otherwise pass us by. Where we might use a more general term, …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Concrete and Abstract
If someone said to you, there was police activity in the alley last night, would you know what happened? You would not. If a coworker told you that there are a number of issues and aspects that have come up related to the development of the project you both are working on, would you know …
Breakwaters
Here is a sentence whose punctuation poses an interesting grammatical problem, and where there are problems, of course, there are opportunities: In fact, they behaved like an authoritarian dictator: questioned people on the street with whom they disagreed, detained people with whom they disagreed, forced out people with whom they disagreed. The author wants to …
Aspect
Probably the first idea that comes to mind on the subject of verbs is tense. In an earlier post (Time and Tense), I explained briefly the organization of the six tenses in modern English and laid them out one to the next across a timeline. In addition to tense, though, verbs take on another feature, …
Questions, Direct and Indirect
I have noticed lately that the question mark is having a difficult time asserting itself. In an email to a client recently, a student wrote I have collected the information you requested. Would you be able to meet this Thursday afternoon. His second sentence here is directly asking a simple question, so shouldn’t it conclude …