Which of these two versions of the same statement do you prefer: I like fresh vegetables and the risk of a frost had passed and I planted a garden, or I like fresh vegetables, so when the risk of a frost had passed, I planted a garden. The first sentence takes three thoughts and presents …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Criticizing Creation
In a number of earlier posts (It’s Time to Start Writing; Another Short Revision; First This, Then That), we have looked at the essential difference between the frame of mind we assume in undertaking an initial draft and the very different mind we put on to revise that first attempt. The British novelist E. M. …
A Game Played Seriously
Everywhere and always, decade by decade, the debate about the rules of grammar flares up. Some say there never was a permanent set of rules which everyone agreed upon, others say the rules are there but no one knows them, and still others say, rules or not, no one should tell them how to write …
Why Read?
Why do we read and why do we read literature? The British scholar Gilbert Murray, an unimpeachable authority in classical studies during the first half of the twentieth century, thought that readers could be divided into two sorts: some read for amusement, for appreciating the craft of writing, for gathering the ideas to carry on …
Watching Images
We read works of literature both for their ideas and for the ways in which their authors convey those ideas to us. In his collection of essays entitled The Cutting of an Agate, the poet W. B. Yeats says that “it is not possible to separate an emotion or a spiritual state from the image …