Viewing profile — rnprdk

Ad hominem can be completely appropriate if you're making a point about someone's character/credibility. I don't know why people think that ad hominem means you should never make a…

"Very" is a fine word. There's nothing about it that inherently "degrades semantics and syntax." In fact, I think that's probably a meaningless statement. How could it possibly deg…

I once had a professor who assigned regular essays with a maximum length of one properly formatted page. He was quite demanding, and I think I probably learned more about writing f…

I went to Butler University and I struggled much like the Penn student above. Two hospitalizations while there, I believe. Everyone involved there--all the professors I knew, and a…

Many "good writing style manual[s]" are kind of full of it. An interesting bit from the wiki(1) on passive voice: "For example, despite Orwell's advice to avoid the passive, his Po…

A fun contrast to this would be kottke.org's "Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace" from a while back: http://kottke.org/09/03/growing-sentences-with-david-foster-... Also: …