Contradictions, Your Style, and "Fad Advice"
I’ve heard the advice about using descriptive verbs in the place of adverbs a lot lately. For example:
He ran quickly.
becomes
He sprinted.
and
She gave him the papers angrily.
becomes
She thrust the papers into his chest.
I see the wisdom of this because the language is more concise. A good verb choice can also take on the workload of adverbs in many cases.
I have also heard lately that any of the more descriptive verbs for “said” are gauche, purple prose, amateur, etc..
Now, I’ve got to wonder—because the same people who give the former advice to writers are likely to give the latter—why this disparity occurs.
If she ordered or crowed or snickered or murmured, aren’t those words stronger and more descriptive than the vague, albeit utilitarian ”said”? And which advice is right? Which advice should writers take when it comes to dialogue tags—use descriptive verbs or use only “said” and “asked”?
I may not have a point here, but if I do, it’s this: advice from writers about writing is flawed. It pulls from the style and preferences of the writer giving the advice, and is therefore stupendously subjective. A writer can give you advice in one breath that will firmly contradict the advice in his next.
Beware, my fellow writers, of those stating their opinions as fact, especially if they fail to include why they have that opinion. One writer’s style choice is not and should not and can not be the style choice of another. The words we use may be the same, but the way we choose the wield them is not.
Please do not give in to what I call “fad advice”—advice which is not so much bad as it is a trendy opinion. Your style is your style, and the only person who should be making judgment calls about your style is you.
-C
Switch up importance.
Using “—” makes a person pause, forcefully considering what’s after the incomplete or complete thought.
Using “(” and “)” makes a person skip over, considering what’s inside the parentheses half-heartedly and ends up regarding it as nothing.
Using “,” makes a person read over, fully considering what’s inside the commas as equally beneficial to the sentence.
Adding “—” to the beginning or ending to your name could make you feel important, even if you don’t know it. Adding “(” and “)” to your name could make you seem reserved—it’s there for whatever purpose, if it’s read, then it feels special. Adding “,” to your name could make it seem like a command, a continuous fragment/phrase, or sometimes, if something’s added after it, equally interesting.
Your love,
—Your love
(Your love)
7 Sentences That Sound Crazy But Are Still Grammatical
mentalfloss.comSeven implausibly grammatical sentences from Mental Floss:
1. ONE MORNING I SHOT AN ELEPHANT IN MY PAJAMAS. HOW HE GOT INTO MY PAJAMAS I’LL NEVER KNOW.Take advantage of the fact that the same sentence can have two different structures. This famous joke from Groucho Marx assumes that most people expect the structure of the first part to be
One morning [I shot an elephant] [in my pajamas].
But another possible, and perfectly grammatical, reading is
One morning [I shot] [an elephant in my pajamas].
4. THE RAT THE CAT THE DOG CHASED KILLED ATE THE MALT.Make a sentence with multiple center embeddings. We usually have no problem putting one clause inside another in English. We can take “the rat ate the malt” and stick in more information to make “the rat the cat killed ate the malt.” But the more clauses we add in, the harder it gets to understand the sentence. In this case, the rat ate the malt. After that it was killed by a cat. That cat had been chased by a dog. The grammar of the sentence is fine. The style, not so good.
7. THIS EXCEEDING TRIFLING WITLING, CONSIDERING RANTING CRITICIZING CONCERNING ADOPTING FITTING WORDING BEING EXHIBITING TRANSCENDING LEARNING, WAS DISPLAYING, NOTWITHSTANDING RIDICULING, SURPASSING BOASTING SWELLING REASONING, RESPECTING CORRECTING ERRING WRITING, AND TOUCHING DETECTING DECEIVING ARGUING DURING DEBATING.This sentence takes advantage of the versatile English –ing. The author of a 19th century grammar guide lamented the fact that one could “run to great excess” in the use of –ing participles “without violating any rule of our common grammars,” and constructed this sentence to prove it. It doesn’t seem so complicated once you realize it means,
“This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate.”
Read the rest of the sentences in the article.
These weird-but-grammatical sentences illustrate an important fact about sentence construction: we don’t just use syntactic rules to put words together, but we also need to consider how much memory or processing power is available to make sense of them. If you put enough thought into these seven sentences, you can get them to mean something reasonable, but it definitely takes a bit more thinking.
(And then there’s also pragmatics, which is what makes it weird to say “the sky is orange” or “yesterday I walked my pet dinosaur” or the classic “colourless green ideas sleep furiously”).
“ This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”
—Gary Provost, quoted in Roy Peter Clark’s (terrific) Writing Tools:
Ok, I am so pissed off. I can’t deal with our generation and the generation younger than us. People don’t understand the importance of grammar,syntax or spelling. It’s so crazy how stupid most of are. I know I am NOT a reader however, I know the difference between their/there/they’re or your/you’re/yours. I get there is a difference from proper english and computer english but do you think that most people differentiate between those two languages? No. I can’t imagine being a teacher today. Seriously, the papers children write are probably horrible. I can see the essay saying, “Ur da bestest!” or something ignorant like that. When I have children, I have to teach them the difference between real english and computer english and when to use each other. Sorry, this post was triggered by one of my little family members. She used the word, “affect” instead of, “effect” and it really irked me beyond belief because she thought was hot using the wrong word without even knowing it.
The U.S. Grammar Guild Monday announced that no more will traditional grammar rules English follow.
theonion.comIn honour of Grammar Day today, check out this vintage Onion article.
The U.S. Grammar Guild Monday announced that no more will traditional grammar rules English follow. Instead there will a new form of organizing sentences be.
U.S. Grammar Guild according to, the new structure loosely on an obscure 800-year-old, pre-medieval Anglo-Saxon syntax is based. The syntax primarily verbs, verb clauses and adjectives at the end of sentences placing involves. Results this often, to ears American, a sentence backward appearing.
“Operating under we are, one major rule,” said Joyce Watters, president of the U.S. Grammar Guild. “Make English, want we, more archaic and dignified sounding to be, as if every word coming from the tongue of a centuries-old, mystical wizard, is.”
