Grammatical Structure Quotes

People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

The subject comes first, the medium second.

I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.

Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.

We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.

Don't you think that's the main reason people find [writing] so difficult? If they can write complete sentences and can use a dictionary, isn't that the only reason they find writing hard: they don't know or care about anything?

A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you've already written. Often the story you're looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.

Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one.

The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do .

Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.

I'd rather be a comma than a full stop.

Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.

A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text.

No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.

Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence, which is a noble thing.

You have to continue and discover the grammar of things, of what we can see.

If pressed to supplement Tweedledee's ostensive definition of logic with a discursive definition of the same subject, I would say that logic is the systematic study of the logical truths. Pressed further, I would say that a sentence is logically true if all sentences with its grammatical structure are true. Pressed further still, I would say to read this book.

How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars.

Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!

who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you

The best translations are always the ones in the language the author can't read.

As a young writer, I learned a lot about grammatical structure from reading plays, from performing the plays. I think that was a wonderful apprenticeship.

A schoolchild should be taught grammar—for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.

The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science.