Not a sound anywheres-perfectly still-just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe. then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Mark Twain: from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “it’s one of the great sunrises in all literature. Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
Le Guin has published more than sixty books of fiction, fantasy, children s literature, poetry, drama, criticism, and. Masterly and concise, Steering the Craft deserves a place on every writer s shelf. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. Le Guin also offers a comprehensive guide to working in writing groups, both actual and online. That was when they also declared that the pronoun he includes both sexes, as in “If a person needs an abortion, he should be required to tell his parents.” My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. (“It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses,” said George Bernard Shaw.) The grammarians started telling us it was incorrect along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. But Shakespeare used their with words such as everybody, anybody, a person, and so we all do when we’re talking. Violation: “Each one in turn reads their piece aloud.” This is wrong, say the grammar bullies, because each one, each person is a singular noun and their is a plural pronoun. “And here’s an example of deliberate violation of a Fake Rule: Fake Rule: The generic pronoun in English is he. Le Guin and her essential guide, Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story.
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