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Coordination and Quotative Inversion Meet Again
I’ve been reading another book by Beverly Cleary to Doug and Adam. This one is Muggie Maggie, which was published in 1990. As I read it, every now and then I notice a sentence that, although perfectly...
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Tolkien, Rowling, and Quotative Inversion
Yesterday I finished reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to Doug and Adam, and that’s enough Harry Potter for a while. I haven’t decided what we’ll take up next, but I did read them a...
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More on Coordination, Quotative Inversion, and Beverly Cleary
“So how was school today?” I asked Doug as we walked from the bus stop. “Good,” he said. Then he remembered something: “I checked out Strider at the library today!” “For me?” I asked. “Wow, that was...
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Away to the Window I Flew, Tore, and Threw
I’ve written about “The Night Before Christmas” (the poem formerly known as “A Visit from St. Nicholas”) a couple of times before. Once it was to untangle the dense syntax of As dry leaves that before...
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Or Will We Have?
Doug likes to say he has no interest in the kind of linguistic stuff I talk about, but every now and then something will catch his ear. For a while, there was a videogame that Doug and Adam had been...
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Not Once But Twice
I was reading a column by Charles Krauthammer yesterday, and read this sentence: Not once but twice (Afghanistan and then Iraq) did Bush seek and receive congressional authorization, as his father did...
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Diagramming Interrogatives
A couple of months ago, Rentz and Lentz at the Bcomm Teacher Xchange blog were kind enough to include one of my posts in their list of resources for learning how to diagram sentences. However, they...
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Seldom Is Heard a Discouraging Word
The wife has spent numerous hours planning the itinerary for a trip we’re going to take out west later this summer. She has tricks up her sleeve that I never would have thought of for finding the best...
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Classroom Debate
Me: So what did you guys do in history class today? Adam: We had a debate on which was more effective, Progressives or Populists. I argued for Populists. Doug: Why did you say Populists were more...
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