An early obstacle one comes up against on the road of grammar and style is the towering habit English has of using a string of words as one part of speech. The science of grammar, as opposed to its art, is meant to give us the rationale by which to revise skillfully what we have …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Beach Balls
Students of the Chinese martial art tai chi learn a pose in which they extend both hands, cupping them into the shape of a sphere while each hand (each half of the sphere) remains separated from the other. They are then told to imagine that both their hands are pushing on a rubber beach ball …
A Confusion of Memories and Lies
The agreement we hold—human to human, citizen to citizen—is that we are telling one another the truth. So obvious is this that even those who know they are not speaking the facts are telling their lies on the presumption that they are true, because no one believes what a liar says is a lie. Truth …
Mind’s Eye, Body’s Eye
Most of us have, I think it’s safe to generalize, little to do with poetry. Between a paragraph of prose and the stanza of a poem, we are likelier to prefer the indicative sentence to the symbolic verse. Poetry is ponderous in a way even the poorly written paragraph is not; it slows us down, …
Making Things
Lacing, sewing, weaving—all of these are arts which produce a structured fabric of some sort, a textile which stands as a context for both use and significance and the pleasure that attends both. Interestingly, the words textile and context are linguistic twins; both, along with the word text as well (note the –xt combination in …