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Grammar and Language: Structure and Expression
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language. — Ludwig Wittgenstein Grammar and language—two terms sometimes conflated, with meanings that often overlap and blur. Yet, we can classify and distinguish each by their function in human communication. In this article, we’ll explore two frameworks…
Relationships and Meaning
Preface My blog is primarily dedicated to the meta: writing about writing. Yet, in its original form, it was also a place for personal reflection. Today, I am sharing a post that reflects one of the most fundamental reasons I write: Writing is not merely a method of communicating with others. It is a way…
Technical Writing Best Practices
Creating User-Friendly Documentation Welcome to a deep dive into the art of technical writing! We’ll unravel the secrets behind crafting user-friendly documentation for end users of software. This post will delve into key methods for structuring, formatting, and writing documentation and step-by-step instructions, ensuring that users not only engage with the content but can easily…
Writing Concisely
We’ve all encountered writing that repeats, uses more words than necessary, and seems to do everything but get to the point. It’s annoying. Yet, haven’t we all embellished school essays to appease an arbitrary word count? Concise communication is the opposite: It’s brief and direct. And it’s mainly a matter of diction (word choice) and…
The Writing Process
Writing is hard. Some people even find it intimidating. Writing can be challenging because it requires clear expression of thoughts and ideas, attention to detail, and effective communication. Writing is daunting for some because they struggle with articulating their thoughts, fear making mistakes, or lack confidence in their writing abilities. But having a structured process…
What is Technical Writing?
When I started searching for my first technical writing role, I focused on laying a solid foundation. I aimed to build a theoretical framework that would guide me as I developed my skills and explored my interests in the field. I desired answers to all these questions: This blog post answers these questions broadly—not just…
English Verb Tenses: Explained
Recently a native English-speaking student reached out to me to clarify the use of the perfect and perfect progressive verb tenses. I was intrigued. It’s not a topic I come across too often. Even I needed to do some deep digging to ensure I understood those rather uncommon-ish and complex tenses. (It’s something my grammar…
Elements of Content
Content, or the topics that are written about in a text, is shaped by several rhetorical elements: These rhetorical elements are based on the Rhetorical Situation or Rhetorical Triangle, which dates back to Aristotle. Any piece of writing can be characterized by using these elements: a product review, a text message, or the label on…
The Editing Process
Editing is often thought of as reparations for spelling atrocities and grammatical crimes. But it can be so much more than that. Your writing is so much more than its cosmetic blemishes. Your writing is an expression of your personality (i.e., voice), emotions, and opinions—the subtext, the underlying symbolism, and unspoken words communicated save only…
You’ll Never Be This Way Again
You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again. Azar Nafisi I was born, raised, and educated in…
I Wrote a Book
I’m not a word nerd, and I’m ambivalent about my ability to craft a gripping fictional narrative. But my gravitation toward language is intrinsic. The underlying structure that creates a place for the semantical flowering of mutually understood expressions is what fascinates me. Why can we say colorless green ideas sleep furiously but not green…
Commas: “For the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed”
“If you bend a branch until it’s horizontal, the sap will slow to a stopping point: a comma or colon, made of leaves grown into one another and over one another and hardened. Out of this pause comes a flower, which unfolds itself in spirals, as if the leaf form, unable to keep to its…
Visiting Boston
In Boston, my phalanges glaciated, but I have endured more frigid elements in ritualistic initiations of the Boy Scouts. I did, however, buy another jacket while there and layered myself in synthetics and cottons until I was honored as the Michelin Man’s cousin. I boarded several trolly-like trains and felt the squeaky irks and jerks…
Magical Mystery Ride
On this Halloween’s Eve, I helped my very best friend set sail onto a new journey. He’s flying north to Boston—a historic place in which he’ll help Boston University with some crazy super-sophisticated data science stuff that I cannot begin to fathom. As he typed away—for hours—at the Python code, sometimes I would lean down…
A Post Card in Time
As Marie Kondo instructed, I laid every book I owned onto the floor. And as I reached into my pile of linguistics books, I opened the cover of this book about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (a famous linguistic conjecture that suggests the language(s) that one speaks influences their notions/conceptions of the world). Nestled into the bind…
I Did Not Eat Foods With Added Sugars For 30 Days: Here’s What Happened
“I understand that this is highly likely to be significantly more difficult than when I started intermittent fasting. I am going to cause a famine in my gut microbiome, and it will result in the genocide of billions of bacteria.” Said as I emptied my pantry of oatmeal cream pies Introduction Immersed in a Joe…
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Dillon Bolding 