Can't think of anything clever.

One of the more fascinating of Crystal's lessons is on pages 190-191, in which he discusses the meaning, or lack thereof, of individual words. Or rather, as he phrases it, "Isolated words do not lack meaning. Rather, they have the potential for conveying too much meaning," (191) and so are often not clear by themselves.

To take a slight jump from this reasoning, writing could be defined as reductive, in that it defines words more sharply and brings them more into focus the more it expands on itself. One word, like "charge," to use one of Crystal's examples, has a number of possible meanings, but a sentence like "I need to charge my computer" is much sharper. Likewise, a paragraph on why the computer's battery is dead has greater explanatory power than the sentence, and a manual on how computer batteries work provides more information than any of the others.

Perhaps, then, writing is our way of sharpening the world around us and calling it into clearer contrast for our own sake. By reducing reality into sentences we make it more palatable and sensible.

In the grammar chapter, my own sense of grammar is essentially what he describes for students who went to school between the 1960s and mid-1990s: "You would now have only a vague and unsystematic appreciation of sentence structure and little understanding of grammatical terminology" (230). While I do appreciate the importance of proper grammar and have a general sense of it myself, I never learned it in school and so have almost no ability to diagram a sentence. I don't think this has hindered me much (except in standardized tests that required identification of sentence structure), but it concerns me somewhat that I may have to teach these concepts without much understanding of them.

I don't want to get too long-winded, but those were a couple of my immediate impressions from the current Crystal reading.