Welcome to NoRedInk! Welcome to NoRedInk! The Sentence as a Miniature Narrative. Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
I like to imagine a sentence as a boat. Each sentence, after all, has a distinct shape, and it comes with something that makes it move forward or stay still — whether a sail, a motor or a pair of oars. There are as many kinds of sentences as there are seaworthy vessels: canoes and sloops, barges and battleships, Mississippi riverboats and dinghies all-too-prone to leaks. And then there are the impostors, flotsam and jetsam — a log heading downstream, say, or a coconut bobbing in the waves without a particular destination. My analogy seems simple, but it’s not always easy to craft a sentence that makes heads turn with its sleekness and grace. Grammar Made Simple. - PrincipalsPage's Posterous. Fear of Error. Before the holidays, I wrote a brief post commenting on something Stan Carey had written in the Macmillan Dictionary blog about adopting a forgiving attitude towards mistakes.
I concluded that post by saying that “Better writing will come not from the fear of error but from the appreciation of the power of great prose.” Although I now wish I had been a bit less pompous, that is an accurate reflection of how I feel. At least it is what I tell others they should feel. But I had an interesting moment of further reflection recently that made me wonder how well I practice what I preach.
Grammarics. Most Popular Posts of the Year - #15, 10 Grammar games. The YUNiversity. Grammar: Brief and Naughty - Part 1: The 8 Parts of Speech.