Like the mass of cables drooping behind a desk, the conceptual connections from one sentence to another have a tendency to get gnarled up in a big, snaggly tangle. That’s because the links connected to any idea in our web of knowledge run upwards, downwards, and sideways to other ideas, often spanning long distances. Inside the writer’s brain, the links between ideas are kept straight by the neural code that makes memory and reasoning possible. But out there on the page, the connections have to be signaled by the lexical and syntactic resources of the English language. The challenge to the
...more
