Word: syntax
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...REALLY NEED to know about this show is summed up in the title, which works like this: capitalize the letters of a word to make them seem like initials; reverse the natural order of syntax in a phrase; don't worry if the meaning gets lost in the process as long as the result looks uncommon. Following these simple guidelines, Cornelia Ravenal rearranged that hackneyed phrase, "the original sin," into the bogus poetry of "SIN...the original." It's a title that pokes fun at cliche by blowing it up, flaunting it, the way pop art does, as though...
Throughout Frost's Watergate assault, the old Nixon mannerisms inject an uneasy déja vu. The most discomforting is his reflexive, contrived smile, flashed?when he is under harsh attack. Sometimes his face freezes impassively, his eyelids fluttering. He stutters a bit under stress, and his syntax breaks down. At certain moments his lips shut tight, his mouth seems to shrink...
That A Place to Come To works as well as it does is largely due to Warren's poetic mastery of language. While his diction is less lush than Faulkner's his syntax less consistently run-on, he possesses a marked gift for penning phrases laden with metaphorical richness. His characters struggle to evade the "doomful tangle of time" and watch music flowing over faces like "the flow of fate as it returned upon itself." In winding torrents of words, they unthread the skein of illusions cloaking their lives, acknowledging its demise in cold, sudden, one-sentence paragraphs. Tone, metaphor...
Traditionally, educators have blamed the fact that Johnny can't write on inadequate training in the basics of grammar and syntax. Not so, says A.D. (for Albert Douglass) Van Nostrand, professor of English at Brown University. He contends that the problem is not so much that Johnny can't parse a sentence as that he can't think. Or more precisely, he cannot think on paper. Even a student who is a whiz at grammar, Van Nostrand argues, may be a dunce at stringing together sentences and organizing paragraphs...
...tone is aggressive, the rhetoric insistent (and the syntax a bit shaky). "We believe that the conditions of our time force us to recognize the distance between what we say liberal arts can do and what it is now doing," declares the Manifesto of Liberal Arts College Presidents. Colleges have merely educated students to be consumers of the status quo, not innovators, the manifesto charges, while college presidents have become "mere managers, not educators." Furthermore, it asks, do students who come to college "without the skills to read, to think critically and to express themselves leave our institutions with these...