Where it originated I don’t know, but the belief exists and seems to persist that a good writer does not begin a sentence with the word but. This is not true, as many traditional guides to English style affirm. It is true, certainly, that some occasions are better than others to begin a sentence in …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Pattern and Feeling
The English art historian and philosopher Herbert Read wrote, among a long list of important titles, an excellent little work entitled The Meaning of Art. Composed for the general reader and not exclusively for the scholar, Read’s short introduction makes an important point early on: a work of art comprises both objective pattern and personal …
Time Now and Then and Having Been
It’s fine to talk about the importance of the humanities, but it’s finer to practice them. In the humanities of language and literature (two subjects which can be separated only academically), how well we come to appreciate what we’re reading depends to a great extent on how well we understand what the language is doing. …
Trickery
I was fooled the other day by the first paragraph of a recent piece by Sam Kriss in The New York Times Magazine, “Why Does A. I. Write Like…That?” The opening was apparently the work, or an imitation of the work, of artificial intelligence, and the author’s point was to illustrate how passable and ubiquitous …
Ante and Post
The point of theory is practice. When we’re trying to learn how to do something better, like revising what we’ve written, for example, the more we understand the rules of the game, the better we can control the board. And in the triathlon of language, that theory includes instruction about where to place pronouns in …