I don't have a ruler but ... Pt II

Continuing from here but this post will be shorter, promise.

Recently I paid attention to how I use commas because it seems to me that many people overuse them. And I noticed that in early drafts of chapters and blog posts, I do it too!

And I realized that typing while I think is the culprit. I go along banging words out as they occur to me and when my thought process gets stuck, I stop typing--but first, I add a comma. It's like I have to capture every nuance of thought, even the pauses. For a first draft, that's absolutely fine. Now we're back to proofreading: okay, you've gotten a bunch of ideas down kind of as they formed. Great, you've got coherent thoughts and you want to tell people! Go for it.

Just proofread before you press “publish” or “send”, okay? It doesn't take long and it's not as annoying as flossing. Here's a tip from a copy editor I briefly worked with: Start with the last sentence, read that out loud, then move on to the second-last sentence, and keep going backwards. It's best to have another person follow along on their own copy because they catch things you might miss, but even doing it alone helps.

You can even do it between paragraphs. Whenever you temporarily run out of ideas, read over what you have so far. Once you get in the habit of proofreading it becomes automatic. Your first drafts and off-the-cuff posts will have fewer mistakes. More people will smile at you.

Too many commas can slow readers down. That’s exactly what you don’t want in scenes with fast-paced action or somebody’s hyped-up, tumbling thoughts. Even in blog posts, too many commas make me feel like I’m riding a cantering horse: bouncing up and down.

Commas. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, some are necessary and some are like those spiked strips cops throw across the roadway to catch speeding crooks. I don’t normally pontificate like this but some things just get in my craw and I have to snap about it.

Rant over, really. Feel free to disagree with me, it’s fine. Won’t be the last time, no doubt :D

image courtesy of DarkSide/stock.xchng

I don't have a ruler to slap your hand with, but ...

Sometimes, the world changes in unnecessary ways. You ever notice that? Soon as I decide I like a new product at the grocery store, dammit it's gone. A neighbor plows the snow out of his driveway and into the parking space in front of your house. So as I read blog posts and story drafts, when I see an unnecessary trend in how people use English, it pesters me.

Most word processing programs have spell checkers included. I usually use Blogger in Firefox, and that infamous red squiggly line appears underneath "alot" because it's incorrect. Do people turn off their spell checkers? Do they just not notice the red squiggle? Do they just not care? I don't know.

I'm not talking about occasional typos. When somebody repeatedly uses the wrong form of a word, it's almost certainly not a typo.

For example:

• "alot" instead of "a lot"
• "flush out" instead of "flesh out" (unless you really don't like the thing you're talking about. "Flush out" has a completely different meaning)
• "peak interest" or "peek interest" instead of "pique interest" 

Most U.S. editors and agents are not going to look favorably on a query that uses "alot" or "peak interest." I bought a self-pubbed story but had to put it down about 1/3 of the way in. When I popped on to Amazon to leave a review, I saw lots of comments about how badly edited the book was. So readers do notice this stuff.

There are rules for using English. Some of them can bend and some of them are meant to provide standardization so we all know what the heck we're talking about. 

Mistakes in blog posts are pet peeve of mine. When you deal with a publisher, you might find mistakes in the finished book that you had nothing to do with. Blogs are totally in our control. Proofread, that's all I'm saying. If there's time to put together a post, there's five more minutes to proofread it. Sometimes you miss stuff. I get that. My regular critters find mistakes in my chapters that I missed. But typos, left out words, and misuse of homophones don't happen often in my writing because I proofread.

Proofreading is not some mystic or arcane power. Anybody can do it. You don't have to be OCD to fix mistakes.

I have one more thing to say but I’ll keep that for next time. Thanks for reading! It's a grey day in my part of the Northeastern U.S. so maybe that's affected my mood.  Happy 2013 everybody!
Image courtesy of bjearwicke/stock.xchng

Zombie nouns!

Despite my aversion to things zombie, this is one of the best grammar posts I've read in a long time. Leave it to the New York Times to present an article that tackles an often difficult language concept right to the ground.

Nominalizations: nouns made from other parts of speech. For example, the word gruesome (speaking of zombies) added to the suffix -ization gives the new word gruesomization. Yeah, there's all kinds of uses for that, aren't there!

In my novel, I use bits of nominalization to express one of the differences between higher classes of society and lower. As Neal leaves behind his well-known Latino street gang world and tries to fit in with privileged Anglo (white) society, he struggles to understand the words some people use.

People speak English, and his English is certainly functional if not fluent, but he sometimes has no idea what's being said. When he first meets the rock band Sylvyr Star, one of them purposely uses pretty formal English to test Neal's grasp of the language. I need to make a bigger point out of how much that stings Neal.

Neal's early chapters contrast him with the band. For scenes in his POV, I work hard at simplying not just his dialogue, but the narrative that comes from his deep third POV. Gradually, Neal's use of English get closer to Sandy's more polished speech but keeps a rough edge to show that he accepts that his past will always be part of him.

Flexing the language as I have been, using it in very precise ways to tell Neal's story, reminds me how important it is to write coherently.

If I throw in pomposity and abstraction to Sandy's dialogue and narrative, it won't fit at all. I'd be knocking readers on the head with my intent and that's generally bad form. There are a couple scenes where grandiloquence is appropriate, but they're short so as not to make my readers run screaming.

Choose your style of language carefully and stay consistent. Not doing so is one of the things that makes writing choppy and stilted. Want to test your writing? In the NYT article, Helen Sword points us to The Writer's Diet. From their site: "The WritersDiet Test is a diagnostic tool that assesses whether your sentences are flabby or fit. Originally developed for academic writers, the test has also proven popular with students, technical writers, business analysts, journalists, and even fiction writers."

This blog post didn't fare so well :( But samples of my WIP did very well. I know I still have to watch for too many forms of "be". Give it a try! What's your biggest weakness and strength, according to the Writer's Diet gurus?