I heard someone say the other day that he never felt more confident about his writing now that he relied on the assistance of AI, to which a reasonable reply might be that this writer isn’t writing. To feel confident should mean to have faith in one’s own skills, manual or intellectual, and so this …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Home to School
The language arts. How would you go about introducing that subject to the middle schooler you’ve decided to homeschool? A friend of mine in that position asked me this question recently. We are inclined these days to just jump in to something, believing that we’ll understand the why of it later, if we ever do …
So Much Depends on a Word or Two
It might be said with some good degree of truth that the best reason to study language closely—and grammar is the foundation of that study—is the habit of awareness it can help instill. To be aware of what’s going on predisposes us to ask questions and look for the reasons behind the circumstances we find …
Rain or Shine
If it rains tomorrow, I won’t go to the beach; but if the sun shines, I will. A perfectly good sentence with a perfectly wonderful thing to do in the world if, in fact, the sun shines. But what if someone had put it all this way instead: If it rain tomorrow, I would not …
Present, But Not a Fact
Let’s tackle, or at least try to wrestle to the ground, a slippery topic in English grammar: the conditional sentence. Entire volumes could be (and have been) written on the subject, so here in the space of eight hundred words or so, our goal is just twofold: to get a bird’s eye view of the …