Sunday, January 20, 2019

Building Great Sentences

With another stubborn cycle now ended, with the susurration of unfurling calendars now completed, with another year of restive upset now predictable, another revolution (this one around our one true star, our Sun) now proceeds tremulously.

If the above periodic sentence sounds at all like an artifact recently unearthed from a cultural time-capsule, perhaps it's because, I confess, that I have listened this month to 23 of the 24 lectures in a series entitled, "Building Great Sentences," prepared and given by Prof. Brooks Landon, and is offered for sale by The Great Courses, a company from which I have acquired many lecture programs.

I was motivated to increase my ability to construct more effective correspondence and communication after having been subjected, for the past several years, to the often incoherent babbling of Donald J. Trump.

I have always attempted to keep myself informed of the pressing events transpiring in the United States and around the globe; such being the case, my having to listen to the ill-conceived, unstudied, and nonsensical ungrammatical remarks of Mr. Trump on an almost daily basis has been, well-- "so sad."

Ironically, we could have no better example of the results emanating from a lack of attention paid to communication skills than our current corrupter-of-language-in-chief. It is my hope that all parents and teachers will see the urgent necessity of redoubling their efforts to impress upon their charges the importance of effective language usage.

All those reading and understanding this message can and ought to contribute to influencing the education of all those people amongst whom we live; those very people upon whom we shall certainly rely upon in order to generate and share the benefits, hopefully, of a brighter, and more just society for everyone.

And now, I depart: I am going to listen to that final lecture.