Grama Girl here. I'm Minyon Fogarty and this week I have a quick and dirty tip about

the words reticent and reluctant and a meeting middle about the difference between which

and that. Let's start with the tip. People sometimes confuse the words reluctant and

reticent. Reluctant means unwilling or disinclined. It comes from a Latin word meaning to struggle.

Here are two examples. Squiggly was a reluctant witness at the trial. ArtVarck was reluctant

to reschedule his entire fishing trip just so he could go to a one hour, Mardygraw

committee meeting. Redisant comes from the Latin word for silent and has traditionally

been limited to describing speech. Whereas someone who's reluctant is generally unwilling

or disinclined to do something, someone who is reticent is unwilling or reluctant to speak,

or is someone who prefers to keep quiet instead of sharing information. A reticent person

would never be accused of sharing TMI too much information. Here's an example of reticent.

Squiggly tried to get ArtVarck to tell stories about his fishing escapades, but ArtVarck

was reticent as usual. Although reticent has been used to mean reluctant so often that

sometimes reluctant is listed as a definition for reticent, if you want to be precise,

it's a good idea to use reticent in a more limited way to mean just reluctant to speak.

Your quick and dirty tip is to think of the eye in reticent as matching the eye in the

word silent. And now onto the meeting middle. I'm going to give you a simple story and

then a more complicated story for people who want more nuance. To understand the difference

between which and that, first you need to understand the difference between a restrictive

element and a non-restrictive element, because the simple rule is to use that with a restrictive

element in which with a non-restrictive element. But don't worry, it's easy. A restrictive

element is just part of a sentence you can't get rid of because it specifically restricts

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