I asked a student recently to write about something he enjoys doing. He returned with a paragraph on cooking, and here (with his permission) are his final two sentences: Although cooking seems effortless, it is quite challenging. To achieve the right texture, not undercooked or overcooked, not only one needs to manage the timing precisely, …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Reading Closely
I have quoted from the nature writer Rachel Carson before. Here is another passage from her The Edge of the Sea. She is describing a place she knows on the eastern seacoast of the United States: One of my own favorite approaches to a rocky seacoast is by a rough path through an evergreen forest …
Prepositions
Most of us are confident with the idea that nouns name things (tree, freedom) and verbs indicate an action (throw, walk) or a state of being (is, were). But what do prepositions do? Some say that prepositions (along with conjunctions, if truth be told) are the slipperiest of the eight parts of speech. They are …
Wrote or Has Written?
Many years ago, a friend of mine had a particularly unpleasant experience on a flight to Europe. She wrote the airline a letter, and they made amends by sending her a voucher for a free flight in the future. The question for us is, why did I just use the verb wrote in the last …
Running On and On
What does it mean, really, to think clearly? It’s an important question because writing and thinking are so closely associated. To ask what thinking clearly means is also to ask what writing clearly means. If we confine our discussion here to expository prose—the explanatory composition most of us undertake most of the time in emails …