If I could teleport myself to any moment in American literary history, I would set my controls for the crisp fall day in November 1856 when
Henry David Thoreau met
Walt Whitman at Whitman’s family home a few blocks from the Brooklyn Naval Yard. The year before, Whitman had published the first edition of
Leaves of Grass, and sent a copy to Thoreau’s mentor, the essayist
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson responded with
a glowing fan letter, saying, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Whitman, being Whitman, slapped the great man’s words on the spine of the second edition of his poems, simultaneously pissing off the Sage of Concord and pioneering the
book blurb.
This was the context of Thoreau’s meeting with Whitman on November 10, 1856. As we learn in
Laura Dassow Walls’s excellent new biography
Henry David Thoreau: A Life, when Thoreau was in his early 20s, Emerson had anointed
him as the next great American poet, showering Thoreau with praise and helping him get his poems published. Now 39, Thoreau had long ago given up poetry for essays, but he wanted to meet Emerson’s latest enthusiasm for himself.
Things got off to a rough start when Whitman declared, in his casually messianic way, that he represented America and Thoreau responded that he “did not think much of America or of politics & so on—which may have been somewhat of a damper to him.” Thoreau also was put off by the fact that Whitman hadn’t made his bed and left the chamber pot out for all to see. But when Whitman gave Thoreau a copy of his second edition—the one with Emerson’s blurb on the spine—Thoreau loved it, though he was troubled by its sensuality. “He does not celebrate love at all,” he wrote. “It is as if the beasts spoke.”
It is a testament to the power of Walls’s biography, which is on a fast track to definitive status, that she pushes the reader look beyond the obvious Puritan squeamishness of this observation to see how, for a man like Thoreau, who spent his happiest hours tramping in the woods feeding his hunger for contact with raw nature, a poet’s ability to channel the beasts of the field could also be seen as a rare gift.
But the connection between the two men went deeper than that. Whitman was lusty and brash where Thoreau was solitary and contemplative, but in many ways they had led similar lives. Both threw over conventional careers, Whitman as a newspaper editor, Thoreau as a Harvard-educated school teacher, to focus on their writing, much of which they ended up publishing themselves. More than anything, though, they were alike in their indifference to their differentness. Whitman, bohemian and essentially jobless, spent whole days riding the omnibus up and down Broadway declaiming
Homer at the top of his lungs. Thoreau had lived for two years in a house he built himself near Walden Pond where he wrote essays, planted beans, and spent weeks in the dead of winter obsessively measuring the pond’s width, length, and depth.
So it’s hardly surprising that when he returned home from his visit to Brooklyn, Thoreau carried his copy of
Leaves of Grass, in Emerson’s words, “like a red flag, defiantly.” Thoreau heard in Whitman’s poetry what he was striving to capture in his own work: a true, unadorned American voice. “Though rude & sometimes ineffectual,” he wrote of Whitman’s book, “it is a great primitive poem—an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the American camp.”
It is a commonplace of writing workshops that writers must first “find their voice,” but today’s writers have it easy, needing only to find a voice authentic to themselves as individuals. The task was trickier for American writers of Thoreau and Whitman’s generation, who came of age in the early 19th century. Writers of the so-called American Renaissance of the 1850s, which include Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, along with
Herman Melville, and
Nathaniel Hawthorne, had to locate within themselves a voice authentic not only to them personally, but to an entire nation.
For writers like Thoreau and Whitman, both born in the 1810s, the American Revolution was very much a part of living memory. But while their grandfathers had helped overthrow British tyranny, the literary world they inherited still saw British and European literature as the model for all but the most frivolous popular writing. You can hear this influence in even the work of that most distinctly American author,
Edgar Allan Poe, who set many of his most famous tales in Europe, and in his poems employed a rhyme scheme and classical rhetoric (“Quoth the Raven,” etc.) wholly foreign to the American ear.
In his 1844 essay “The Poet,” Emerson called on American writers to cast off shopworn tropes of the past and strive to capture the spirit of their raw, still-forming nation.
Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boats, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
Whitman heard a version of this essay as a lecture in Brooklyn, and
Leaves of Grass was in many ways an answer to Emerson’s call. But so, too, was Thoreau’s
Walden and Melville’s sea tales and Hawthorne’s Puritan-era romances and
Emily Dickinson’s verses.
To an uncanny degree, each of these foundational American writers followed a similar path, stepping off the conventional career track early in their lives to draw inward and look more directly at the world. Whitman quit newspaper work and spent years bumming around New York, taking odd jobs and declaiming poetry on city buses. Melville put out to sea and lived among the natives of the Marquesas Islands. Hawthorne spent 12 reclusive years in his parents’ home studying colonial history and writing fiction. Dickinson, who came along a few years later, retreated into
her parents’ home, where she spent much of the next four decades scribbling poems on scraps of paper. And of course, Thoreau built a cabin in the woods near Walden Pond with enough room for a bed and a desk and three chairs—“one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.”
One of the pleasures of Walls’s
Thoreau is seeing how Thoreau’s stubborn refusal to lead an ordinary life turned a bright, but otherwise rather ordinary young man into a great and original artist. The story of Thoreau quitting his first teaching job because he wouldn’t strike his students is the stuff of legend. Less well known is his long, largely unsuccessful struggle to carve out a more conventional career as a writer. For a time, Thoreau wrote poetry while helping out in his family’s pencil business and, later, launching a small private school with his brother
John. When that school folded, Thoreau moved to Staten Island where he tutored the son of Emerson’s brother and tried to break into the bustling New York literary market.
Thoreau’s year and a half in Staten Island, the longest he ever lived away from Concord after college, was a slow-moving disaster. “I have not set my traps, yet, but I am getting the bait ready,” he wrote home in a letter shortly after he arrived in New York. But just four months later, he had to admit that “my bait will not tempt the rats; they are too well fed.” To Emerson, he joked ruefully, “Only the Ladies Companion pays…but I could not write anything companionable.”
This was the Thoreau who went into the woods, a 20-something Harvard grad who had tried teaching, tutoring, tinkering, and freelance writing, and ended up back where he began, in his hometown helping out in his parents’ pencil business. But he wasn’t a failure, exactly. By the time he moved to Walden Pond, on July 4, 1845, he had gathered an impressive array of literary benefactors, including Emerson, Hawthorne, and
Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of the
New-York Tribune, who served as an informal literary agent for Thoreau the rest of his life.
Perhaps more importantly, Thoreau had hit on a successful working method. It began with daily immersion in nature, mostly through walking, which Thoreau did the way other people read the news, and with much the same purpose. He walked everywhere, and everywhere he walked he noticed: What wildflowers were out? On what date had the pond iced over? Why was it that when a farmer cut down a pine forest oak saplings sprouted, but when an oak forest was cut down pine saplings sprung up?
He recorded these observations and questions in his journal, which he had started, at Emerson’s urging, shortly after he finished college and continued until he could literally no longer hold a pen, amassing some two million words. He shaped this raw material into essays, which he tested out in lectures he delivered to his neighbors in Concord as well as to audiences across New England. The best of these lectures he reshaped yet again into articles or book chapters, which he then published.
The cabin at Walden was crucial to all this, putting him in close, daily contact with his principal subject—nature—while giving him a rent-free “room of his own” where he could transform the raw data of his journal entries into lectures and essays, and, after yet another round of sifting and shaping, into books. At the same time, as Walls puts it, Thoreau’s “two years, two months, and two days living at Walden Pond became and would forever remain an iconic work of performance art”—one which, when boiled down to a single, lightly fictionalized year, gave him the narrative spine for his most famous book.
In his short time at the pond, Walls notes, Thoreau began work on the great bulk of the material he is famous for today, including a first draft of his first book
, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a nearly finished draft of
Walden, and a rough draft of his essay “Ktaadn,” about his first visit to Mt. Ktaadn, which would figure in his posthumously published book
The Maine Woods. The flailing young New York freelancer who couldn’t dream up anything companionable enough for
The Lady’s Companion had found his voice.
That voice, by turns cocky and self-serious, erudite and homespun, spiritual and blasphemous, rings out from every page of
Walden: “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” “Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.”
It’s there, too, in Whitman’s “Song of Myself”—“I cock my hat as I please indoors or out”—and in the iconic opening line of Melville’s
Moby-Dick: “Call me Ishmael.” From there, the American sound changed and grew as the country itself grew. The writers of this first American Renaissance were all white men from the Northeast. As the nation spread westward, writers like
Mark Twain and
Ambrose Bierce added a tart dose of western humor to American literature and Southern writers like
William Faulkner pulled and stretched the English language like taffy. Women writers like
Edith Wharton and
Willa Cather joined the choir, as did black writers of the Harlem Renaissance like
Countee Cullen and
Langston Hughes.
Each generation since — the great Jewish novelists of the 1950s, the Black Arts Movement poets of the 1960s, the Dirty Realists of the 1980s — has shaped and refined how America sounds to the world, but that distinctly American voice, now so familiar we only hear it when a writer finds a new way to use it, can be traced directly back to Thoreau and Whitman and the other writers of the 1850s, who broke away from their European influences and created a truly American literature. What’s interesting is how they found it. The writers of the American Renaissance were extraordinarily well-read, but they arrived at their unique sound not principally through reading, but through deep immersion in the world. To one degree or another, they each stopped what they were doing and listened, and what they heard coming back was the sound of a new country.
In a Slate piece published back in the fall, Kitty Burns Florey took on the unenviable task of diagramming the utterances of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Florey, the author of Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, clearly has a unusual predilection for sentence diagramming (which I’m pretty sure the Army Field Manual prohibits as a form of torture.) Nonetheless, her project was more journalistic than aesthetic; she suggested that diagramming a sentence “provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator.”
Perhaps, rather than having some grammatical genius that allows him to seem for confident and masculine than he may actually be, he is merely a product of several years of Warriner's English Grammar.
These are not even the words of Obama, but that of his speech writer, whose job is to make him look good. Therefore, diagramming a sentence from his speech should say nothing about the Messiah.
Kirk, Tx.
Kirk,
What we think we know can often prevent us from learning new things. Last year's Time piece on Obama's speechwriting process:
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1837368,00.html
Neil
Kirk,
Are you saying Obama's speechwriter is scripting not only his prepared addresses, but ostensibly spontaneous responses to press conference questions (which was the context for this sentence)? I'm not sure I follow your line of argument, but would be happy to know more…
Neil,
The article does mention "the 27 year old wunderkind," Favreau who helps him with his speeches, so which are Obama's words and which are Favreau's?
Garth,
I certainly wouldn't be surprised if Obama rehearses his answers to questions that he anticipates. He is the slickest politician since…well, Bill Clinton, so polishing answers just as with speeches would be easy to imagine. After all, any politician who can convince the American people that a trillion dollar spending bill is going to stimulate the economy certainly gets props from me.
Kirk, Tx.
PS Garth, at least we agree on Bolano.
Goodness. It must be hard work, Kirk, patrolling the entire internet for instances of flattering or admiring statements about the new President of United States which can be turned into sneering implications that those who flatter or admire him have switched off their brains.
How do you find the time?
@Goodness. Or rather, how does someone find the time to diagram the president's speeches?
Kirk,
A speechwriter can only do so much. Like Obama, George W Bush had a team of 3 competent speechwriters yet he couldn't even put together two words coherently. The job of a speechwriter is to write in the speaker's own voice, not be the voice. If you're implying that Obama is just a voicebox, you're sorely mistaken. You've got to be pretty good with language to make the president of the Harvard Law Review.
What troubles me about this sentence is not its grammar, but its content. Obama sees the important issue of bringing to book people who abused executive power under Bush administration as "looking backward"? Ethics are at issue here, and unfortunately Obama has failed to live up to his own pre-election standards on the question of accountability. Check out the delays and settlements he recommended in the subpeona of Rove and the nod he gave to the Justice system to basically uphold security certificates and such from the Bush era. He is not willing to deprive himself of the vast and unconstitutional powers that he inherited from the Bush administration. This will be the most serious credibility issue with his presidency.
Could we have some similar diagram also for Bush speech? please.
I totally agree Obama is a great communicator, which in most instances today means he reads well from a teleprompter. And I concur that Bush was perhaps the worst communicator we've ever had. Laughable. But actions speak louder than words, so after all of Obama's campaign promises he has a mountain to climb.
Kirk,Tx.
Kirk,
It's your cult that wanted Bush's War, so that they could act out The Left Behind series, for "Jesus". I'm not surprised that logic and facts are regarded as the enemy.
Sorry I don't fall into your category of Republican Evangelical. I am an atheist that happens to be a conservative in most cases.
If you think that the Bush administration regarded logic and facts as the enemy you aint seen nothin' yet!
Kirk,Tx.
I don't think magic-talking is a sign of respect. If american people were to be treated as adults the truth would plain and clear (adults can handle the truth, right?). Instead everybody is left to draw his own conclusion (magic talking alert!). The wrongdoers will be prosecuted, or not? Keeping an eye on the future is more important than justice or not? The same political-correctness-BS just in a nicer package.
This MUST be put up side-by-side with a Bush quote. Please, I'm begging.
I've met Obama (I was at the University of Chicago when he taught there). This isn't from a speechwriter; he's always spoken like this.
The sentence analyzed exposes one of Obama's serious weaknesses – lack of precision and clarity.
When Obama's finally gotten to the period at the end of the long sentence, the listener has no more insight into Obama's views or probable future actions than they did before he uttered the first word of the sentence. While a casual observer (or an Obama worshiper) thinks the question has been answered, it was not. He could either prosecute everyone in sight within the Bush administration (of course, only for "clear" violations), or he could do absolutely nothing (of course, in the interest of "looking forward").
I am hopeful that Obama's seemingly intentional ambiguity and failure to take a clear position is a political technique he reserves for dodging domestic issues and that he lets experienced people craft his messages for the international stage. In international matters, failure to communicate effectively and clearly can have serious consequences including unnecessary escalation of tensions to the level of warfare.
The article makes fun of Bush 43 for the statement: "You're with us or you're against us" [I believe the author used a fragment of Bush's sentence here, but that's not material to this discussion]. However, the purpose of speaking is to communicate. It is reasonable to agree or disagree with Bush's position, but it's impossible to not better understand Bush's position and attitude after hearing this statement – he views sitting on the sidelines on the issue of terrorism to be equivalent to supporting terrorism.
If you watch his many interviews or read his two self-authored books and countless articles dating back to his law school days and early marriage life and on through the present, you will see that Obama has always talked this way. His themes, views, syntax and delivery have been remarkably consistent. Say what you want about him, but his voice – with or without a speechwriter's help – is authentically his. To say otherwise is mere ignorance or delusion.
To all who believe Obama's statement is obfuscating but that there's clarity in Bush's "you're with us or you're against us" statement: You are wrong.
Obama here says we will enforce the laws, but he's not about to set the government toward consuming itself with second-guessing all dubious Bush Administration decisions; that should evidence emerge of clear wrong-doing, your title and your friends will not save you from justice, but that his administration is not about to launch a comprehensive witch hunt. This is pragmatic.
Bush's alleged clarity is anything but pragmatic. If an overall long-term ally like Mexico or France opposes our invasion of Iraq because they find our charges of Iraqi terrorism-abetting to be unpersuasive — are they now "with" the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11? Is Russia "with" the terrorists, or Syria — or Hamas? It would seem they are. And yet we permit them to go on existing — which makes us "with" the terrorists, doesn't it? Sorry, but I never saw the clarity in Bush's black-vs-white jingoism.
I am pleased to have a president with an adult ability to examine the world and address its complexity. That serves the national interest well.
Logosfera, I would argue that letting people come to their own conclusions is, in fact, treating them like adults–especially when compared with the paternalistic alternatives that you offer.
Secondly, in Obama's answer you can find answers to every question you raised. Will wrongdoers be prosecuted? He says yes, when it is clear that they in fact did wrong. Is keeping an eye on the future more important and "justice" (which, in fairness, is not synonymous with "looking backward" which is what he actually said)? Yes, he says he's more interested in looking forward than dwelling on the past. These are not contradictory–He's more interested in the future than the past, but when clear wrongdoing is occurred then those accountable should be prosecuted.
I think you do a great job showing how Obama's brain works as it is manifest in his construction of syntax and design. He's a remarkable thinker, strategist and writer. I think his sentence structure demonstrates all the complexity he brings to the issue, his understanding of opposing ideas, and an aesthetic sense of parallelism and rhythm.
It's an odd world we live in when sentence structure *is* construed as indicative of morality, but actions aren't.
Stop addressing Kirk the Texas troll. Internet 101, people.
The commas are misplaced in that sentence. Here I fixed it for you!
"My view is also that nobody's above the law and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen but that, generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards"
Unfortunately this quote didn't contain the one mistake which I observe fairly regularly in Obama's speech: the use of "a" before a noun beginning with a vowel. For example, he says "launch a attack" instead of "launch an attack." I've also heard several friends who were raised in Hawaii speak similarly, so maybe it's a local Hawaiian thing?
The semicolon was correct. When the first clause contains commas, the punctuation mark before the conjunction should be a semicolon for the sake of clarity.
Yr pedantic trivia for the day
Anonymous @ 6:01:
It isn't clear what you hope to imply about the comparative morality of the actions of Presidents Bush and Obama, if anything, in this thread about clear communication.
No one here is claiming that sentence structure indicates morality, only that it indicates a person's thought patterns. Sentences that become complex without becoming unclear indicate something very promising about the mind producing them. That's all.
Using "a" for the *unstressed* article in all positions is hardly localized to Hawaii; I've heard it all my life. I say it – and I've never been to Hawaii. Many people do it, even if they wouldn't write it; it's simply a phonological feature of a large number of English dialects. You may call it a "mistake", but the difference between "an" and "a" has been a fluid one in English for a long time.
@Ridger–
I think it's the glottal stop that arises between the "a" and following vowel sound that reminds me of the spoken Hawaiian language. Hawaiian is replete with consecutive vowels that are separated by glottal stops. I was just wondering if that found its way into English as spoken in Hawaii.
As for it being a "mistake," I was taught that it was incorrect, both in speech and writing.
Why does it matter that it's unstressed??
What with all the sentence diagramming? He still didn't say anything. Typical politician – platitudes and no substance.
The second "that" clause isn't really parallel to the other two, because it's subordinated to the "if" clause
In my experience as an applied linguist specializing in the American accent, "a" and a following vowel sound overall tends to be more of a male characteristic, and then secondarily, a sub-30 trait.
"I certainly wouldn't be surprised if Obama rehearses his answers to questions that he anticipates."
Non sequitur; you asserted that these were Obama's speech writers words, not his — strongly implying that they were part of a speech. Your response simply confirms what was evident from the first — that you're a grossly dishonest person.
Can we go easy on Kirk, folks? He's been commenting here for a while and is a Bolano fan, which is two marks in his favor, and while his first comment did strike me as a bit piquant, I'd like to invoke (invent?) the law of proportional snark.
Beautiful, how elegant, like a flower!
Thanks Garth!
Nothing against Obama or his supporters. His English is that of a well-healed Ivy Leaguer, I just don't agree with his policies.
Bolano Rules!
Kirk, the "Texas Troll"
Sheesh … You would have thought that Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) would have ended on January 20, 2009, but clearly, it hasn't.
"You would have thought that Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) would have ended on January 20, 2009, but clearly, it hasn't."
Seeing as his two wars and 5 trillion dollars of national debt are still with us, I see no reason to let up.
Kirk,
You are welcome to disagree with Obama's policies, but your critique is not based on much more than unexamined assumptions and rigidified bias, with a liberal (muahaha) dose of snarkiness thrown in for good (read: bad) measure.
This, unfortunately, is a dire disease of the conservative mind. The previous President and his slavish followers being prime examples. Listening to the likes of Rush Limbaugh only releases more toxins into the body politic and offer no cures at all.
"Bush Derangement Syndrome" not letting up? That's nothing — 8 years later, conservatives are STILL blaming stuff on Clinton.
Kirk, Obama's been in office a few weeks. Bush was in there screwing things up for 8 years. I'm not willing to talk down the new president, on whom we all depend, for a few years yet.
I want him to have his chance to make things better, and I'll support him in much of what he does in his early days in office.
Considering that conservatives spent 7 years shrieking about how unAmerican it was to question the president — calling the rest of us traitors and haters (and a lot of you are still doing it) — I'd think you guys would be willing to give THIS president a little leeway.
@Kirk: "If you think that the Bush administration regarded logic and facts as the enemy you aint seen nothin' yet!"
Really? This administration is going to play looser with logic and facts than the *Bush administration*?! Now we *know* you're a troll.
There is everything to respect about the wise words of a thoughtful, respectable and intelligent president of the United States – something we have not enjoyed for a while.
But the sentence in question is remarkably simple; so much so that if it represents such cause for celebration by the author, one would wonder whether he too shared this property.
I refuse to believe that we have reached the stage where anything uttered in public that is not incomprehensible garbage is reason for elation. Things have surely not grown that bad yet.
I never said anything about Bush…
As I stated before Obama is an eloquent communicator but what he is communicating is his desire to make us a socialist nation.
After 7 years of the New Deal, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau said that all the money that had been spent had not worked. Trying to spend our way out of recession is an exercise in futility.
Kirk, Tx.
I'm thinking Bush supporters are just jealous that our president is no longer as stupid as they are.
@Kirk, that's a "well-heeled Ivy Leaguer", not "well-healed".
– a not-so-well-heeled Ivy Leaguer in VA
i kinda like your post! :D love it. thanks for posting :D
I chuckle every time someone uses the phrase "socialist nation" or even the word "socialism" today, in reference to Obama. It's right out of the GOP playbook.
The funny thing is, the GOP lost this election, and they're not bright enough to notice they continue to lose ground. Their talking points just aren't getting any traction, except among the very small number of Sarah Palin syncophants.
Keep on digging in your heels, Republicans, and do your best to wreck the country even more than George Bush managed. Stay right out in the open, spreading your lies, where we can see you. The rest of us will get on with business while you squabble in the mud.
Hank,
Obama wants to "spread the wealth," how is that not Socialism?
I believe that the GOP message is getting traction…They're certainly not going down without a fight about this "stimulus" package.
Again, George Bush is no longer in the White House!!!
But I would rather have the country wrecked by Bush than utterly destroyed by Obama's policies.
Furthermore, I believe that those that pulled the lever for Obama will live to regret it when they are giving half of their paychecks for programs that only make individuals and businesses more reliant on government.
Texas Troll
I'm sorry, but I just find it hilarious that Obama making the US a "socialist nation" (which I don't think will happen) is regarded as a bad thing. I, personally feel that we should work to close the ENORMOUS gap between the rich and the poor, and since those who are well-off obviously aren't doing it themselves, I think the government should assume more responsability for that.
"I chuckle every time someone uses the phrase "socialist nation" or even the word "socialism" today, in reference to Obama. It's right out of the GOP playbook."
Sorry, but there are more than knee-jerk conservatives who think that running a huge deficit is fundamentally immoral. The impulse to control and direct is not unique to the right; you on the left employ the same tools for different ends. The real issue is individual liberty vs. statism, *classical* liberalism versus collectivism, whether progressive or conservative.
Nationalization of the banking sector doesn't amount to socialism? Read some Von Mises. Please.
Very erudite, I’m sure. I think by now we’ve all concluded that Obama is a thinker, that he doesn’t go off half cocked like Bush and his ball-and-Cheney. But what bothers so me about Obama’s use of language is his frequent grammatical mistakes. He says things like: America is doing our duty. Correct version: American is doing ITS duty or We are doing our duty. He says things like: President Bush has invited Michelle and I to the White House.
How can someone who has attended Harvard and taught constitutional law not be able to master such mundane and fundamental concepts as which pronoun agrees with its noun? I honestly can’t understand. His grammar is helping to dumb down America.
Even Mrs. Obama uses this construction. She said, “I am a woman who loves my husband.” She too has been privileged to receive a wonderful education, but helps to dumb down the language.
Come on, Obamas! Start cracking those grammar books with your kids!
Mae
Socialism aside, I’m no “grammar queen,” but this sentence needs a lot of work. Too many “that’s,” a useless “also,” and if one moves “forward,” why would they not alternatively move “backward” (minus the s).
For example:
–My view is that no one is above the law. But if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, people should be prosecuted as ordinary citizens. In general, I am more interested in looking to the future, rather than the past.–
If Obama could put together a really great string of words off the cuff, then, he might be considered a great speaker. Otherwise, in my opinion, he needs all the help he can get–including a teleprompter.
I’m anxious to see an update to this article. How does “word salad” fare in the realm of sentence diagramming.