Is this use of "as" and these other words really a rule of modern writing? If so, where is it written down and how the heck do you write around it?
A friend I made at Context just did a crit for me of the first couple of chapters of my novel. She pointed out the "dollar words" and also circled all my pronouns, which seem to be another problem I have that I can't figure out how to write around. My story has two brothers as the main characters. I use their names often enough for the reader to understand who's speaking or being written about, but when referring to his arm (for instance), I use the pronoun "his" to describe his arm (when his mother pushes his sleeve up to his elbow - see all the "his" there? Every one of them was circled in this crit).
I truly appreciate my friend's crit (she pointed out some other stuff that I CAN figure out how to work around) but I'm at a loss for how to fix these particular problems.
If someone can point me to a book or rule that explains how to get around pronouns and those "dollar words" and still write sensible English, I'd appreciate it. Or are these "rules" this just a "Seaton Hall" thing? I don't have to please their professors (thank heaven!) -- I just have to please the reading public! I have LOTS of books on writing and nowhere have I seen this list of "forbidden" words - nor do I have a clue what to do about my pronoun problem.
Thanks for any suggestions you can give me!
Lynda
I will be watching for more experienced advice on this thread, thanks.
without usrping the thread, does anyone have ideas about when a word is too big or obsolete. I have a college degree and read everyday, but a couple of times my work has been critted and they re-wrote my stuff using words I had to google. when I looked them up they were good words but I had no idea what they were.
We don't want to read "Jim put Jim's foot into Jim's shoe." There's nothing wrong with pronouns.
What is true is that words are sometimes overused. I went thru my last WIP searching for really, very, actually, and some other words, and found that I could often remove them. They're not bad words; they just weren't needed: there's not much difference in "The reasons were actually clear" and "The reasons were clear," for example.
The usual advice from professional writers isn't to eliminate small, common words. (Eliminate "of"? How else do you say "of"?) It's to replace needlessly long words with simpler ones. Utilization becomes use; fulvous becomes tawny (or tawny becomes brown); that sort of thing. And, especially, to rarely use synonyms for "said": "He said" is a lot easier on the eyes than "He fulminated."
As for dollar words, I've heard it and I don't buy into it. As you can see, you can begin a sentence with the word as. Furthermore, none of those words are right out though none of them are invisible -- they can be overused.
I once had an English professor in college whose entire grading rube rick consisted of two things...did you put the word "it" into your paper and di you put the word "that" into the paper? Each occurrence docked you half a letter grade. If you had none -- you got an A+. I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever seen in my life. You can find dozens of these dollar words and each person will have a different idea about which words qualify,.
Don't use any word as a crutch. Try to put verbs and nouns in your sentences because they are more powerful than adverb and adjectives. But these are *guidelines* only...I would never tell you to eliminate any word from your writing entirely.
Bad advice?
I guess it would depend on how often they are appearing in your prose.
On English professors...the one I had in college had a bugaboo about "there" in sentences. ("There is," "there are," and "there would be.") I can't say it's not something to look for and / or eliminate---but I reserve the right of use.
I concur with discarding synonyms of "said"---though having, say, four or five pages of dialog, each with "he said," is too much. Break it up with descriptive sentences instead, or throw in an occasional synonym---it won't hurt more than some other mistakes you might make.
[This message has been edited by Christine (edited January 28, 2007).]
quote:
Hall said you can't start sentences with "as" because you can't do two things at once.
Eh?
As I slept, the bomb went off.
As I walked past the post office, the robbers emerged from the front door.
----
Always take such advice with jaundiced ears.
"Suddenly" is rarely helpful, particularly at the beginning of a sentance. But for certain types of action that wouldn't be assumed to have happened very quickly, it can be quite important to mention. "Actually" only needs to be mentioned when there is a possible question as to the real nature of the event. "He actually started tearing out his hair, I always thought that was just an idiom." "Literally" can be used this way, but is used improperly so often that people no longer take it seriously. "I'm literally dying of [something or other]" as teens are infamous for saying.
"As" as the beginning of a sentance shouldn't usually be taking to mean "at the same time as", if it does mean that then you should recast the sentance. "As" often means "it being the case that" when it's at the beginning of a sentance. But there are exceptions. "As he answered the phone, he noticed something on the handset." In that case, you can't really move "as" anywhere without losing the sense that he went to answer the phone, and while he was in the process of that action he noticed something on the handset. "When it crawled onto his face, he realized it was a spider." Note that "suddenly", "actually", and "literally" weren't used here, as none of them would help. Also note that the pronoun "it" begins that sentance as a reference to "something" and then transitions into being "a spider crawling onto his face".
Nitting any word without considering whether it is used appropriately is meaningless. Some words are rarely appropriate, and can be catagorically eliminated from entire classes of literature. Others are fundamental elements of the English language (and how would rephrasing that as "among the English language's fundamental elements" really help anyone?).
Basically, any "rule" that isn't rooted in an understanding of writing as a means of communication is worthless.
Edit: It's possible that certain unreadable books out there may actually abide by some of these ridiculous rules. If those are the only books these people like, then of course my suggestion won't work. In that case, however, you know they simply have bad taste.
[This message has been edited by rickfisher (edited January 28, 2007).]
Survivor, thanks for the comments on "suddenly" and "as" - you helped clarify my thinking there. Thanks a lot!
BruceWayne1, the kind of words you're talking about I call "fifty cent words" - you calling them "$50 words" shows I haven't kept up with inflation! LOL! And IMO, if a word needs to be Googled, it might not be the best choice for your work, depending on your audience. Are they leisure readers just looking for a fun read, or are they the intellectual type looking for a challenging read? I read fiction for fun and don't want to have to stop to look words up very often, but I have a pretty good vocabulary (then again, Survivor uses words in his posts sometimes that I have to look up, but I'm not reading for leisure here, I'm trying to learn!) The one exception to my "I'd rather not have to look words up while reading fiction" opinion that I can think of are the Harry Potter books. Sometimes the word was just too British for me to understand right away, but other times, it was a word not in my college-educated vocabulary - and since these are supposedly kids' books, I spent the time to learn those words to add to my vocabulary. :-) So think who you're writing for and use the vocabulary that suits them. JMO.
As for the frequency of pronoun use - I will try to cut down on that (and my dear friend who critted this for me and made those comments has offered to rewrite some spots to give me a jump-start, which I appreciate a bunch!). But when you have three males as the MCs in large chunks of the story, there are going to be "he, him, his" here and there because you just can't say "the young man" (when there are two of them) all the time, or "the older brother" or "the younger brother" or "the old mage" - that all becomes quite awkward. I'd rather I have some "writing mistakes" as far as "modern" rules go and have something that reads smoothly than follow every rule there is and have something unreadable.
I do know to "search and replace" for certain words (but you guys didn't know that, so thanks for the suggestion!) - I've been cleaning out "a bit" and "really" which are two words I know I overuse. But I've been through my novel at least 15 or 16 times now, and at 120,000+ words, that's a heck of a lot of work. I'm hoping to start the query process soon, so MAYBE this time will "get it" for me. I hope.
Oh, and my college English professors particular "thing" was "This" - "Never have an unsupported 'this'" (or "that"), meaning you can't write "This is weird" or something like that. It should be (in Dr. Reid's opinion), "This {subject} is weird."
Thanks for your comments!!
Lynda
I neither think you should take the advice at face value nor ignore it. Survivor and Wbriggs put it pretty well. You need to strike a balance: no words are "always" wrong, but sometimes they indicate problems.
As the final check on much of the marketing text my company puts out, I see many people -- even professional writers, in-house and freelance -- overuse words, use useless words, use tepid words, and have structural problems. I can't say anything about your writing without seeing it, but here are some general thoughts.
Regarding "as", look at the first sentence in the previous paragraph. It's not horrible, but it took a long time to get to the subject, "I". I should probably have written, "I am the final check... and I see...". I've also noticed that the use of "as" sometimes indicates a problem with time: it sounds like two things are happening at once, when one must have happened first.
There are tons of phrases to watch for: "in fact", "what this means is" (and its little brother "this means"), "in order to", and "the reason that", to name a few. None of these phrases is bad by nature, but they bear examining. Sometimes they're useless and should be cut. Sometimes they can be shortened. Sometimes they indicate other problems (passive voice, didactic tone, plain old boring prose).
Robert is right to look out for adverbs. Cut adverbs, use stronger verbs, and you'll communicate more quickly and forcefully. (I suddenly want a stronger verb than "communicate".)
The more I do in marketing, the more obsessed I get with cutting. You have to get your point across very quickly, and even 10% extraneous words can make someone skim your text instead of absorb it. (When I'm writing quickly, as I am here, I'm less good at it. Sorry. ) The phrases above often indicate bloated text -- and I often have to cut non-writers by 50-75%, and even professionals by 20-50%.
When I critique fiction, I often look for things to cut, too, and fiction writers are no different from marketing writers. Sometimes we add more words to convey a particular tone or attitude, but even accounting for tone, we often use too many words.
A superb reference for revising prose is (surprise) Revising Prose by Richard Lanham. I'm shocked at the price I'm seeing here -- it's a slender book -- but if you can find a used copy it's well worth reading, and reading again, and referring to.
Lynda, maybe you could post, say, 13 lines that were critiqued so we could offer recommendations based on that specific passage? I don't know if that's allowable on Hatrack, but an illustration at this point would help. If not, drop me an email if you'd like.
Regards,
Oliver
P.S. And pronouns? No idea what she's talking about. Again, a sample might be useful.
[This message has been edited by oliverhouse (edited January 28, 2007).]
Pronouns are good as long as they're not overused. Circling every one of them on a manuscript would piss me off to the point of stopping. It seems like its a cheap trick to seem intelligent. "Get rid of all your pronouns, and you'll seem smarter". Rubbish. If someone can read your work and tell what's going on and who's doing what, it works.
I guess it is good to be aware of dollar words so you can make sure you're not overusing them, or making the writing awkward, but I think it is only a good rule of thumb.
Yes, -ly words get overused. I think its a good idea to search for them and destroy most.
Anyone else think a lot of creative writing professors are just people that can't write for themselves? Maybe I'm wrong.
On critting, in the end it's still your work. I had a friend go over my manuscript and he provided valuable advice. But some things I just had to say this is the way I want it and this is how it'll stay. But most of the advice I did take, and the critting process (we sat and talked about it all in person) helped me not only correct problems, but take the entire story into other and deeper directions. It was amazing.
Matt
Though if you're going to start a sentence with "As", make sure you only hit the "s" key once. A little experience I had in biomedical marketing...
Matt - You had ONE person look at your writing? Yikes! I've had my fanfic betas, my Brit-picker, two volunteers and a couple of folks I asked (because they actually know a lot about writing) look at it, as well as having it critted on www.notebored.com (the first few chapters, anyway). Each person has brought something different to the process and each person's input has been valuable in some way. Those who are readers, not writers, bring me the opinion of those who will actually be buying my books, and their opinion is very important to me. The others have varying levels of expertise in writing. In the end, it's my opinion that matters the most, but some of these folks have pushed me to dig a lot deeper in many ways, to push things harder, resulting in a much richer and better told story.
Oliver, I just did an online search, and there is a "Seaton Hall" in at least three locations (Nevada, and I forget where else, sorry), so my mistake was a natural one, I suppose. I don't know which "Seton/Seaton Hall" this woman attends, but a lot of folks at Context either go there or have been there, so I thought it was an Ohio or Pennsylvania school. But thanks for the tip on spelling the NJ one!
And Oliver, thanks for the link to the book - I have a bunch of books on revising/editing/etc., but there's always room for one more! I got a used one for just over $8 at Amazon. And yeah, that "new" price was ridiculous!
I don't use those phrases you mentioned (in order to, the reason that, what this means is, etc.), so that's not a worry, but thanks for pointing them out. And since we're allowed to post "first thirteen" on this site (and I've done so in the past, although my first 13 are WAY different now), I'll post some lines here in a new post (not a new thread) so you can see what I was talking about. Thanks.
Franc li - "as" with an extra "s" - yeah, I won't make that mistake! LOL! Thanks for the giggle!
Lynda
>>Mum put a gentle hand on Ethan’s arm. “We have a lot to tell you, sweetheart. What’s your brother doing?”
“Building something.”
“Do you think that will that keep him busy for a while?”
“It should.”
His mother sighed and took his right hand in hers, slid the sleeve up to the elbow, then held her hand above the inside of his arm halfway between the elbow and the wrist and muttered an incantation. A small birthmark emerged on Ethan’s pale skin. The spot was the color of dried blood with small bumps around the edges at regular intervals. <<
And yes, I can see how to remove one of the "elbow" references, but I'm pasting here what was critted.
Lynda
"His mother sighed and took his right hand in hers, slid the sleeve up to the elbow, then held her hand above the inside of his arm halfway between the elbow and the wrist and muttered an incantation. "
In an ordered list, you separate the individual elements with commas and only use the word "and" between the last two items. I therefore propose that the sentence might be easier to read like this:
"His mother sighed, took his right hand in hers, slid the sleeve up to the elbow, held her hand above the inside of his arm halfway between the elbow and the wrist, and muttered an incantation. " (I also removed a then because it seemed obvious that these items each occurred one after another chronologically.)
I do think you can remove the second occurrence of elbow fairly easily. If you replaced "halfway between the elbow and the wrist" with forearm, I think it says the same thing.
There is no right or wrong, of course. The only thing that matters is the affect your words have on people.
[This message has been edited by Christine (edited January 29, 2007).]
My friend who did the crit this thread refers to sent me a link to Seton Hall's writing program. Here it is in case y'all are interested. http://www.setonhill.edu/o/index.cfm?PID=13 It's in Pennsylvania. This is where the professor is who talks about "dollar words."
Lynda
"His mother sighed and took Ethan's right hand in hers, slid the sleeve up, and held her hand halfway along the inside of his forearm. She muttered an incantation, and a small birthmark emerged on Ethan’s pale skin."
I figured I might as well get rid of both "elbow"s. The original problem with the pronouns here wasn't that there were too many, but that the first one seemed momentarily to be counter-intuitive. Although it was almost subliminal confusion (does that make sense? What I mean is that I was conscious of confusion for so short a time that I was almost unconscious of it), there was a brief instant when "his" seemed to mean "mother's": "His mother sighed and took his right hand . . . "
And, what the heck, it's also 8 words shorter this way.
Edit: By the way, although I got rid of both occurences of "elbow", I really don't think it's a problem with using a word like that twice in a single sentence. And if you DO choose to leave them, I think it would be better with MORE pronouns: "his" wrist and elbow rather than "the" (though one "his" could be used to cover both: "halfway between the inside of his elbow and wrist". OVERUSE of pronouns is definitely not the problem here.
[This message has been edited by rickfisher (edited January 29, 2007).]
Lynda
In class one day, we were working through a writing sample that contained the phrase "beyond any shadow of a doubt." Based on suggestions from the class, those six words were reduced to three: "without a doubt." I then pointed out that we could reduce the word count even farther by using "indubitably."
At that point, the professor conceded that sometimes it was better not to reduce the word count.
Lynda
Eric, maybe your law professor should have said, "cut unnecessary syllables" -- "indubitably" has one more than "without a doubt".
I forget who said it to me, but I like the rule, "Never follow any rule off of a cliff, including this one."
From Chapter 11, Sophistication (page 193.
..."This tends to place some of your action at one remove from your reader, to make the actions seem incidential, unimportant. If you use these constructions often, you weaken your writing... ."
Is it a rule? Maybe, maybe not. Like all other advice, it is only as useful as the good you are able to take from it.
I HIGHLY recommend the book "Self Editing for Fiction Writers" by Browne and King. HIGHLY.
Matt
http://www.sfwa.org/writing/chadvce.htm
Lynda
You know what Ms Cherryh says: No rule should be followed off a cliff.
[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited February 08, 2007).]
I'm not saying the woman from your group is like that. What I am saying is that writing advice is like dieting advice and eveything else. There's alot out there, some of which ebbs and flows depending on the current trend. In the end, what's important isn't always where it comes from as much as whether it's something that will work for you.
[This message has been edited by priscillabgoo (edited February 11, 2007).]
After that revelation, I tried to stick with "facts" whose origins I could remember. So I remained the obnoxious loudmouth I've always been---but at least I'm sure of the ground on which I stand.
I don't even wholly disagree with the idea. If you say, "nobody I've talked to provides service S to more than P percent of their users" and nobody says "yeah? Well, I'll bet I do," then you're literally right. On the other hand, the first few dozen times you throw out that "fact", you'd better be ready to backpedal.
maybe we should write one.
[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited February 12, 2007).]
In a critical advice context, we always see novice writers come in here crippled by really weird and bad advice that is passed around the (large) circle of writers who can't get published because they all listen to the same, incorrect, advice. Just because there are more writers who haven't broken in than those that have, that doesn't mean that the majority who haven't sold anything are right where they disagree with the minority who have.
Invented facts might be useful in marketing...unless you are the one trying to make decisions based on those "facts". When you make up a "fact" out of thin air, it's a good idea to remember that it isn't a real fact, because otherwise you'll be the one to suffer. Of course, suffering the ill effects of your own made up "facts" is a little more honest than consciously remembering that what you bill as fact to others isn't so, but only a little. If you really cared about honesty, you wouldn't make up "facts" in the first place.
I hope that here we can mostly concentrate on writing advice that actually has some relevance to the realities of communicating with an audience.