The Halfway Mark in Sight, I Pine for Clausewitz

[dr_pretentious]

22,123 / 50,000 (44.2%)

New words: 1736

Current deficit: 2882 Shrinking again!

Working conditions: Longhand at Starbucks in New Brunswick in afternoon with fretful Breva the Axe; after-dinner excursion to B&N with Dan, where I typed from longhand notes while he did research for the GURPS campaign we run; ineffectually attempting to type fresh words while we watched the second half of The Two Towers; typing fresh words in my study after Dan went to bed. Persistent cat on keyboard.

Notable accomplishments: In addition to exceeding quota slightly, I reworked all my Stisele chapter documents into standard manuscript format (which I should have done in the first place when I set them up, duh), and set up correctly formatted new files for the Laurebes interludes, which I hadn't bothered with before November. I had to do something! I had accumulated a small mountain of hard copy with no page or chapter numbers, and was driving myself crazier than strictly necessary.

Notable story incidents: Stisele witnessed death in battle for the first time today. She can see the spirits of the dying as they leave their bodies, and it really freaks her out. Also, Harentil's about to get shipped off to Twenty Locks to study medicine. Harentil doesn't mind so much, because it's what she had in mind to do eventually anyway, but Stisele's heartsick, since the House elders intend it as a sort of banishment. That'll teach those girls to sneak The Book of Cloud out of the library! Keep 'em separated.

Those of you who watched while I bludgeoned my inner scholar to death in my desperate bid to escape from academia will be surprised to read the following sentence:

It pains me terribly that I cannot immerse myself in research.

Back in October, I bought a lovely clothbound edition of Clausewitz's On War, thinking I would have time for some research before Nanowrimo started. Joke's on me. Didn't get to it. The book is flirting with me from across my study. It has...not masculine wiles, exactly, though if the book had a gender, it would certainly be masculine. Informational wiles, that's what they are. Every time I run into a plot problem, I am absolutely certain that reading Clausewitz would make everything come clear. On War is now among the books to which I impute bizarre salvific powers. (And if only I made time to finish Carlyle's The French Revolution, then Hands of Beltresa would magically become irresistible to editors and agents, through the power of its luminous accuracy. Really. And it will, too. Just you wait and see!)

At least it's been a good teaching day. Four weeks ago, when I first met my newest student, Model U.N. Girl, she was unable to name, let alone define, ANY of the parts of speech. Today, she was able to explain in her own words what it means to say that a verb tense is simple, progressive, perfect, or both progressive and perfect. I'd like to be able to claim credit for her improvement, but it's so dramatic, this has to be a case of native ability previously unprompted.

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

At least it's been a good teaching day. Four weeks ago, when I first met my newest student, Model U.N. Girl, she was unable to name, let alone define, ANY of the parts of speech. Today, she was able to explain in her own words what it means to say that a verb tense is simple, progressive, perfect, or both progressive and perfect. I'd like to be able to claim credit for her improvement, but it's so dramatic, this has to be a case of native ability previously unprompted.

I can't do any of these. Care to explain?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Sure. Most of my students have been taught that English verbs only have three tenses--past, present, and future--when in fact we have twelve. Of course, their uses are a little more flexible than the description below can account for, but this is enough to get by on.

Simple Tenses
The simple past is for events that happened at one particular time in the past:
I bought a copy of Clausewitz's On War.

The simple present can, in narration, be used to talk about events that happen at one particular time in the present:
He passes the ball to Sleepy Floyd! He shoots! He scores! And the crowd goes wild!
More often, though, we use the simple present to talk about situations that exist always, usually, or habitually:
I write longhand at Starbucks in the afternoons.

The simple future is more commonly used for talking about events that will happen at one particular time in the future:
Donald Rumsfeld will get his comeuppance.

Progressive Tenses
Progressive tenses are all about duration. The situation described by a progressive tense began at a particular time before the moment being discussed, continues during the moment being discussed, and may or may not continue after the moment being discussed.

The past progressive:
Dan was sleeping while I wrote 1137 of my new words yesterday.

The present progressive:
I am indulging my perfectionism right now.

The future progressive:
At three in the morning, I will be working on Chapter Five.

Perfect Tenses
We use the perfect tenses to talk about sequence, about relationships between two moments in time, if the action that occurred in the earlier moment was already completed before the later moment arrived. It's less confusing than I make it sound, honest.

Past perfect:
By the time I mailed the manuscript of Hands of Beltresa to the Shiny Young Agent, I had made an uneasy peace with its many defects.

Present perfect:
Thank you for your kind invitation, but I have already consumed far too much caffeine today.

Future perfect:
By the time the spaceship reaches the luckless colony, the bug-eyed monsters will have eaten all the colonists.

Perfect Progressive Tenses
Perfect progressive tenses talk about both duration (and so are "progressive") and about the relationship between two moments, with the implication that the event in the earlier moment ends before or in the later moment (and so they are "perfect", and distinct from the merely progressive verbs in which the default assumption is that the action whose duration is being expressed continues beyond the moment in question). The perfect progressive tense is the one we use to express the earlier of the two events.

Past progressive:
By the time the Taguba Report was released, Major General Geoffrey Miller had been "Gitmoizing" the American detention centers in Iraq, exactly as his civilian masters in the Defense Department had instructed him to do, for quite some time.

Present progressive:
I have been working on this dissertation for five years, and I cannot bear it one more minute!

Future progressive:
By the time the rain catches up with me, I will have been riding my bicycle for at least half an hour.




I hope that made sense.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

If you want something thorough and clinical in approach, something with numerous useful diagrams, try Betty Schrampf Azar's Understanding and Using English Grammar. It's written for classroom use and has lots of exercises you won't need (unless you're working through the book with 30 of your closest friends), but it includes everything and explains everything. For weeks, I searched for a grammar handbook I could recommend to my students, and this was the only suitably user-friendly one I found that even mentioned the subjunctive. Azar's approach is to advise you to do the most correct thing, always.

Karen Elizabeth Gordon's approach is to tell you what you can get away with, and to urge you to get away with it. For an adult writer of fiction, especially a native speaker of English with decent ear training, The Transitive Vampire and The Well-Tempered Sentence are adequate refresher courses on the rules, and Gordon's examples are hilarious sentences. They're not really suitable for children, though--all that salacious deployment of clip-art collage!--and they're not designed to be user-friendly for teaching.

It's not embarrassing. If I weren't teaching grammar, I wouldn't remember how to explain what my ear knows, either.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Oops. The last three are mislabeled. They should be past perfect progressive, present perfect progressive, and future perfect progressive. The heading pretty much implies it. What can I say? I was thinking about the impending rain and the thirty minutes of biking I was desperate to get in before it started.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

Every time I run into a plot problem, I am absolutely certain that reading Clausewitz would make everything come clear.

hee! that it would! and many of the characters seem to deserve herr clausewitz's prescriptions.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile, I have to make do with decades-old recollections of Sun Tzu.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

that's probly for the best. it didn't seem to me that any of the characters should be informed by either text, and most of actual warfare is carried out in very crude ways -- march toward the sound of the guns -- even by professional armies. so, it's not like anything you'd write would look funny for the lack of reading either one.

aesthetically, clausewitz seemed closer to how the crown houses act. istm that they'd be right at home with "politics by other means". if you wanted to steep your subconscious in something, i'd choose that.