As many of you know, I was out of town for the past ten days. I visited my elderly father (an exercise in patience and resilience), my twenty-three-year-old daughter (more resilience), and dear friends. It was a fun but exhausting trip.
All this is a way to say I’m just now catching up on reading blogs from the past week. In the chaos of traveling, I missed National Grammar Day, but now I’m happy to share my favorite tribute blog with you, my loyal readers. Oliver Gray always has interesting things to say at Literature and Libation, and this post is one I read and thought, “I wish I’d written that!”
So without further ado, here is Oliver’s take on Resumptive and Summative and Appositives—enjoy!
These 3 grammatical tools are powerful and should be treated with respect. #amwriting #grammar #writetip Share on X
Bust out those style guides, argue over those serial commas, and question the legitimacy of those split infinitives, because it’s National Grammar Day!
After Halloween, my birthday, National Hat Day, National Homebrewing Day, National Wizard Day, and National Drink Beer and Play Video Games All Day Day, National Grammar Day is my favorite. To celebrate the wonders of this syntactically accurate 24-hours, I’ve decided to talk about three of my favorite grammatical tools:
Appositives and resumptive and summative modifiers.
I normally don’t go for such low-hanging Oz-born fruit in my post titles, but for once, comparing these three constructs to lions, tigers, and bears is actually appropriate. I mean, not directly appropriate, as they’re not technically dangerous apex megafauna, but pretty indirectly appropriate as they are powerful and should be treated with respect.
These three are some of the best spells in the grammar-wizard’s tome of arcane writing knowledge. They are also three of the most challenging to master and use correctly. Read more here.
Thanks for stopping by, and Happy Writing!
—Candace
photo courtesy of FreeDigitalImages.net
Oh dear, Oliver’s blog post makes my head spin! Having never learned any real grammar in school, words such as ‘resumption, summative and appositives’ make my eyes glaze over.
What’s funny is that I nod along with the article and then, when I get to that final example, I think…I didn’t really understand any of that!
Hopefully my lack of skill in this area won’t mark me down as a writer…after all, ins’t that what lovely helpers like yourself are for?!
Cat x
LOL! Yes, Cat, I agree that this can be a bit overwhelming, but I’m here to catch you if you stumble! Thanks for visiting!
I did warn that these are some of the most complicated grammatical tools at the beginning of the post 🙂
I’m also here (along with Candace) to help if you have specific questions. I recognize that some of this stuff is really advanced, but I see so few people actually talking about these great constructs that I just had to write the post.