Back in my late 20s and early 30s, somewhere on the way to learning how to write like a grownup, I learned the rules for constructing a paragraph. Here on the verge of 63 and retirement, I find that ...

In her 1989 book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard describes a fellow writer who was asked by a student if she thought he might become a writer. “Well, do you like sentences?” the fellow writer said.