A curious reply has become more common lately, it seems, in congressional hearings broadcast to the public. A question is posed by a committee member, and a witness replies, that is a hypothetical and I can’t answer that, or that is a hypothetical, and it is not worth discussing because it will never happen. What …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Shaping a Sentence
How a sentence unfolds determines what effect it will have on its readers, and a good measure of the art of writing involves shaping and placing the three basic elements of word, phrase, and clause to compose a suitable order. The questions who is my audience? and why am I writing this? remain the two …
Moved to Write
Life is movement. It acts, it reacts, it changes, and what appears to remain the same is just that—an appearance. That is why art, which tries to imitate life, must replicate life’s movement in its constructions in order to affect, to move, its viewers or listeners or readers. How to do this is a matter …
Perfectly Neat
There are regions in the land of grammar that make for rugged terrain. One is the infinitive and another is the conditional sentence, and where those two masses meet the land gets steep. You can find a sentence there like this one, which is similar in construction to one I read recently in the news: …
Animation
The term agency is used regularly in language study to distinguish between a logical subject and a grammatical subject of a clause. We say, for example, that an older couple purchased the house next door, and the subject of that sentence, older couple, is meant to represent the real, actual entity which purchased the house. …