Here’s another chance to sharpen our grammatical tools. Is this sentence correct: he is one of those persons, who is always on time. We will need either two knives or one double-edged sword to examine this deceptively simple sentence, one blade for grammar and the other for punctuation. When we revise our work, we should …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Governing Whom
To keep our technical skills sharp, let’s look at a sentence which presents a second-order grammatical question. We know that every preposition has an object, and when that object is a pronoun, it often assumes a unique form, because some pronouns vary their spelling to indicate their grammatical function. This change in spelling (or position) …
The Precise Truth
If a dictionary defines words, what does a thesaurus do? The word means treasury in Latin, and the basic answer, of course, is that a thesaurus synonymizes, that is, it suggests words close in meaning to one another. Some thesauri merely list groups of related words, others discern the subtle shades of meaning between them. …
To Persuade Is Not Enough
In the study of language, a distinction is made between persuading and convincing. To persuade someone is to induce one to act, whether physically to do something or mentally to believe something. To convince, on the other hand, is to show the reasons something should or should not be acted upon. In the traditional scheme …
Infinite Perception
If I happen to say that the planet Neptune has sixteen moons, I am making a specific, or finite, qualification to the noun moons. If I go on to say that I believe the universe is infinite, I mean to say that there is no specific measure which can be taken of its extent. The …