Grammar for a Full Life: How the Ways We Shape a Sentence Can Limit or Enlarge Us by Lawrence Weinstein -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

Index

Title Page Table of Contents Introduction Grammar to Take Life in Hand

Getting Noticed – Colons Tapping Inborn Energy – Transitive Verbs in the Active Voice The Wherewithal – Certain Prepositions Doing What Works – Anomalous Commas and Beyond Pressed for Time – The Imperative “No Effort Without Error” – Cross-Outs

Grammar for Creative Passivity

Getting Out of One’s Own Way – Passive Voice Active-Passive Hybrid No. 1 – Blessing Active-Passive Hybrid No. 2 – Emily Dickinson’s Dashes

Grammar for Belonging

Wondrous Touch – Elements of Audibility Clear Messaging – Marks and Modifiers that Go Missing … and Much More Bonding – Ellipses A Defense of Correctness – Apostrophes Empathizing – The Apostrophe Errors Made by Other People Generosity – Semicolons, Cumulative Sentences To Compromise but Not Be “Compromised” – “They”—Made Singular

Grammar for Freedom

Distinguishing How You’re Perceived from Who You Are – Modeling the I-Statement Other False Equations – Using E-Prime … in the Past Tense The Linguistic Limits to Freedom – Our Names Having One’s Own Way of Seeing – “Actually,” the Set-Up-and-Reject Formula Friends in the Graveyard – A Special Use of Present Tense

Grammar for Morale

Fulcrum – “But” Grammar, Thing of Beauty – Sentence Length and Repetition, among Other Things

Grammar for Mindfulness

Avoiding Hype and Fearfulness – Overuse of Exclamation Marks, Superlatives, Italics, and Intensifiers Taking Ownership with a Grain of Salt – The Possessive Pronouns Uncertainty – Swapping Our Rhetorical Questions for Real Ones; the Ignorant “I” A Hedge Against Preoccupation – The Future Tense and Adverbial Provisos Tolerating Ambiguity – “And”

Grammar for The End

Our Dying – Order … Then Gibberish and Silence Coda – The Comedienne of Grammar

Sources and Endnotes Acknowledgments About the Author