Chapter 14 -- Probably a Decent Crash Course

Kolln's chapter 14 is...interesting. This is not the kind of information I would hide in the middle/end of any grammar book.

I appreciated her description of the "Deliberate Sentence Fragment," as it's a stylistic choice that I would definitely like to use more in my own writing. To me, it's more about rhythm than the cool-ness of purposefully breaking the rules, but I can understand how that aspect of it attracts certain writers.

Without knowing how to describe what metadiscourse is, I've known for some that I'm probably a metadiscourse addict. I've filled more papers with words like "while," "unfortunately," and other openings than I would like to admit. Kolln's passage was more sobering than enlightening, and I think I'll give the metadiscourse a break for an essay or two.

While Kolln discusses verb choice, I wish that she would talk more about adverbs and adjectives in the same regard. Her passage on verb choice seems to infer that a verb will be the most important word in your sentence -- and I certainty don't believe that this will always be true. I'm usually more concerned with how my adjectives and adverbs shape my sentence rather than the verb, so perhaps I should take her lesson to heart...