To clothe despair in eloquence is to show that it can be endured.

Rhythm is so basic to language that it does not need to be taught.

Rhythm is the song of life. The syllabic stress patterns of speech sync up with the heartbeat we hear in the womb, the pulses of air in the lungs, the strides of walking and running. Beating a rhythm is our first music, the joyous reflex that makes us tap feet, drum fingers and clap hands. To the young man carrying a pair of battered drumsticks eve

A classic way to do this is time, manner and place. It is there in Old English, in the stout sentences of the tenth-century monk-scholar Aelfric, which say what someone did, when, how and where:

A sentence is a small, sealed vessel for holding meaning.

content and form are the same thing, that what a sentence says is how it says it, and vice versa.

I write maybe three and a half thousand sentences a year.

The people you love become ghosts inside of you and like this you keep them alive. The artist Robert Montgomery wrote that sentence after a friend from art college was hit by a car and killed.

Birdwatchers swear they can spot a bird from its jizz. The word’s origins are unknown, but some think it derives from aircraft reconnaissance in wartime and is short for ‘general impression, size and shape’. A bird’s jizz means that a skilled birder can tell you the breed even if it is just a blur flying past in the dusk. A writer’s voice is like t