Sublime

The problem was that in order to make her work legible to the personnel committee (legibility being an area where she must improve, she had been told), it was necessary to set up her argument with theories familiar to the discipline, to couch her work in terms her audience knew.

We have discussed how keywords lead to governing metaphors (“metaphors we live by”) and how those metaphors do a tremendous amount of underground work, directing our responses to others in ways that we’re often unaware of.

get hold of Tropic of Cancer, get hold of Black Spring and read especially the first hundred pages. They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this late date, with English prose. In them, English is treated as a spoken language, but spoken without fear, i.e. without fear of rhetoric or of the unusual or poetical word. The; adjective h

Read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and study emphatic word order. 2. With a pencil in hand, read an essay you admire. Circle the first and last words in each paragraph. 3. Do the same for recent examples of your work. Revise sentences so that powerful and interesting words, which may be hiding

I have often heard writers say that if you have written your lead you have in a sense written half of your story. Finding a good lead can require that much time, anyway—through trial and error. You can start almost anywhere. Several possibilities will occur to you. Which one are you going to choose? It is easier to say what not to choose. A lead sh

no one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.