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. I was reading the Facebook comments on a Huffington Post article. I was so impressed by the sanity of this response. I was hoping that this post was going to be about the use of commas in restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, but that just didn’t happen. Like this: Like Loading...
Verb Tenses In English, there are three basic tenses: present, past, and future. Each has a perfect form, indicating completed action; each has a progressive form, indicating ongoing action; and each has a perfect progressive form, indicating ongoing action that will be completed at some definite time. Here is a list of examples of these tenses and their definitions: Simple Forms Present Tense Present tense expresses an unchanging, repeated, or reoccurring action or situation that exists only now. Past Tense Past tense expresses an action or situation that was started and finished in the past. Future Tense Future tense expresses an action or situation that will occur in the future. The speaker of the House will finish her term in May of 1998. The future tense can also be expressed by using am, is, or are with going to. The surgeon is going to perform the first bypass in Minnesota. We can also use the present tense form with an adverb or adverbial phrase to show future time. The president speaks tomorrow.
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. My analogy seems simple, but it’s not always easy to craft a sentence that makes heads turn with its sleekness and grace. Over the course of several articles, I will give you the tools to become a sentence connoisseur as well as a sentence artisan. At some point in our lives, early on, maybe in grade school, teachers give us a pat definition for a sentence — “It begins with a capital letter, ends with a period and expresses a complete thought.” Library of Congress But that definition misses the essence of sentencehood. For a sentence to be a sentence we need a What (the subject) and a So What (the predicate). I like to think of the whole sentence as a mini-narrative. “They shoot the white girl first.” — Toni Morrison, “Paradise”