What is the difference between being exact and being fastidious? Although it is high counsel to aim for our natural voice when we write, we often forget that writing lacks what speaking essentially represents: our presence. The distinctions and emphases we make with the tone and rhythm of our voice, with our gestures and grimaces …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Time and Tense
Strange to say, we live in time but we don’t really know what time is. Imagine trying to define it for someone. It is probably safe to assume that most of us in our ordinary, workaday consciousness sense a persisting present moment, with a past before and a future after—past, present, future in a line …
Revision Work: Balance
I would like to take up another sentence a student recently composed as part of a paragraph assignment. He was asked to think closely about design, about where and why he was positioning phrases and clauses across the sentences he was writing. In this one, he was trying to postpone the main assertion to the …
There’s Some Problems Here
We remember, of course, the basic rule of grammar that a verb agrees in number with its subject: a client is, but clients are. Standard English word order requires that the verb follow the subject in declarative sentences, and that is what we have all come to expect: The client is in the conference room. …
Actions, Not Things
Writing manuals will often talk about something called nominalization, the habit we have of too often preferring nouns to verbs as we construct sentences. It’s a prevalent phenomenon in modern writing, and why we do it has fascinating philosophical implications, because it points to the idea that we seem to perceive ourselves more and more …