Tuesday September 21, 2021; 8:57 PM EDT
- Some of the best sentences leave the easy path. Some shatter a calcified notion. Some jostle the complacent who have not asked for any such thing.#
- Various writers try to get at this essential act; schools usually don't help young people explore it. Here's a small sampling.#
- "Of course the justness of a word sometimes resides in the precise degree of discomfort it inflicts." --Tim Robinson, "A Crystallography"#
- "The innermost formal law of the essay is heresy." --Theodor Adorno, "Essay as Form"#
- "Mary is tampering with the expected sequence. First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating." --Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own#
- Others?#