You will know immediately, as I did, what this sentence posted at the entrance of a store means to say: Help stop the spread of Covid and stand six feet apart. We are being told to do two things, help and stand, and we understand, without being told anything more, that those two actions are …
Tag Archives: Revision
Revision Work: Balance
I would like to take up another sentence a student recently composed as part of a paragraph assignment. He was asked to think closely about design, about where and why he was positioning phrases and clauses across the sentences he was writing. In this one, he was trying to postpone the main assertion to the …
Revision Work: Correlatives
I asked a student recently to write about something he enjoys doing. He returned with a paragraph on cooking, and here (with his permission) are his final two sentences: Although cooking seems effortless, it is quite challenging. To achieve the right texture, not undercooked or overcooked, not only one needs to manage the timing precisely, …
Revising By Clauses
Grammar books often define a sentence as a complete thought, but that maxim, true as it oftentimes is, might not be good enough if we want to revise our work more carefully. Let’s say, for example, we wrote these two sentences in our first draft: One friend of mine builds log cabins for a living, …