the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or...

In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “‘Well,’ the writer said, ‘do...

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It’s like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field — first base, second...