Lovely Adverbs

Use adverbs as if they were rationed.

- JULIET GARDINER

This isn’t a post by a rabid adverb Nazi.

I don’t have a problem with adverbs. Except when they’re redundant, frequent, or embedded poorly in dialogue tags. Apart from that, they’re cool.

There is a trick to placing adverbs, that’s for sure. The same adverb can sound cheesy in one sentence but fine if that same sentence is tweaked or rejigged. Here are a couple of cheap tricks to make use of. I nicked them out of books I have read.

COMMA

The boy sniffed, succulently. She wanted to hand him a kleenex.

- from Season of Goodwill, Penelope Lively

“You don’t even like computer games,” said Frankie, irrelevantly.

- from The 10pm Question, Kate de Goldi

Note how much better that adverb sounds when preceded by a comma. Imagine the same sentence with no comma. It doesn’t sound nearly as good to me. Without the comma, it’s overdone. ‘Succulently’ is such a wonderful word to use for sniffing up phlegm – and seldom heard in such a context – so the comma sets the adverb off nicely, affording ‘succulently’ its very own space. The adverb feels far from unnecessary. Likewise, Kate de Goldi’s example works, even though she’s making use of the dreaded adverb in a dialogue tag, because there is something humorous about the adverb. Perhaps that’s why adverbs don’t work so often when humour is not intended; because of the inherent take-the-pissness of a dialogue tag adverb.

INVERSION

They looked at each other now, and hugely grinned.

- The Clarinettist And The Bride’s Aunt, Penelope Lively

Not all styles of writing will allow you to get away with this. Penelope Lively’s voice is English and careful and articulate, in which case an adverb before the verb sounds right. (And better than ‘grinned hugely’, which for some reason sounds odd.)

There’s always a fat woman asleep in the front passenger seat, her mouth hugely agape, and a quantity of children going crazy in the back.

- Bill Bryson (of long-distance American travellers) from The Lost Continent

Here, ‘hugely’ adds to the comic effect. Tis true: adverbs are great for writing comedy, which is probably why they so often fail when writing seriously.

Related Link: Ever heard of a ‘flat adverb’? Explained here.

Biceps

Biceps is both singular and plural. It’s tempting to talk about someone’s ‘left bicep’, and I read it quite a lot, but ‘bicep’ is not correct. From Wikipedia:

The term biceps brachii is a Latin phrase meaning “two-headed [muscle] of the arm”, in reference to the fact that the muscle consists of two bundles of muscle, each with its own origin, sharing a common insertion point near the elbow joint. The proper plural form of the Latin adjective biceps is bicipites, a form not in general English use. Instead, biceps is used in both singular and plural (i.e., when referring to both arms).

The phrase ‘left biceps’ still sounds a little weird to a native English speaker unused to singular nouns ending in an ‘s’, but a sentence can always be recast to accommodate this anomaly. Here’s an example from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo:

She had a wasp tattoo about two centimetres long on her neck, a tattooed loop around the biceps of her left arm and another around her left ankle.

- Stieg Larsson, introducing Lisbeth Salander (who also has a dragon tattoo).

The same goes for ‘triceps’, in which the singular form is ‘triceps’. But this doesn’t stop talented writers from making use of ‘tricep’ for comic effect, and neither of course, should you:

If I were to stand on a scale fully dressed, sopping wet, holding ten-pound dumbbells in each hand and balancing a stack of hardcover books on my head, I’d weigh about 180 pounds, which is approximately equal to the weight of Tiny Cooper’s left tricep.

- from Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green and David Levithan

Sign Into Chat

It’s worth doing a final check for prepositions when editing a draft.

Whenever I’m using gmail I see the phrase ‘sign into chat’ on the left hand side of the screen. (I’m never signed in, you see. I have enough internet distractions as it is.)

Thing is, I think it should be ‘sign in to chat’ – ‘sign in’ two words.

If we were to make that sentence into a tree diagram, ‘sign in’ would be linked, because it is a compound verb: ‘sign in’. Those two words belong together.

(BTW, there’s more than one way to diagram that sentence, depending on how it’s interpreted. It can either be short for ‘Sign in in order to have a chat with someone’, or ‘chat’ may be taken as a noun.)

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Since ‘in’ belongs to ‘sign’, it shouldn’t form part of the word ‘into’.

Some writers seem to have a natural sense of prepositions, and never make mistakes.  For anyone not like that, bear in mind that it does matter. The placement of a preposition does make a difference to reading ease, and sometimes to meaning. (In the example above ‘sign in’ is a completely different word from ‘sign’.)

Another example:

I am curious to see how this will tie into the BitTorrent case ruling made earlier this month…

- Slashdot

‘Tie in’ is a compound verb, so in should not be part of ‘into’.

COMPOUND VERBS

In English we have ‘compound verbs’: multi-word compounds that act as single verbs. One subset of compound verbs comprises an ordinary verb + a preposition, which specifies the verb’s meaning:

• light up >> The sky lights up with fireworks.
• put in >> I’ll put in my submission this afternoon.
• come out >> He’ll come out of the closet one of these days.

It’s usually good style to keep each word of a compound verb together, without sticking anything else in between. Some instances sound worse than others:

• He lit a cigarette up. >> He lit up a cigarette.
• I put the submission in this afternoon. >> I put in the submission this afternoon.
• (Note that ‘come out of the closet’ can’t be split. It’s an intransitive verb.)

p.s. I think this is the real problem some people still have with hanging prepositions.

Likewise, it’s not good grammar to take the ‘in’ of a compound verb and shove it onto ‘into’, or to take the ‘up’ and turn it into ‘upon’. I know it’s tempting, when another preposition follows a compound verb, but it doesn’t read well.

That’s why I always do a final check for prepositions at some stage of editing.

The Inelegance of English

pic by delgrosso

I don’t like to be too hard on English. It’s my mother tongue and I feel a little defensive when speakers of other languages point out its (many) deficiencies.

That said, language is a kluge, evolved instead of crafted, so I’m sure every language in the world includes clunkiness that annoys poets and writers of fiction in particular, whose very job is to make their language sound nice.

In Japanese, for instance, they’ve got:

• a clunky verb conjugation called the causative passive
• nouns which can grammatically (and hypothetically) appear after an infinite string of modifying clauses
• a countless number of homophones which can sound like word echo unless positioned thoughtfully
• case particles which sometimes need a bit of masterful variation to avoid repetition
• passive sentences which can’t very easily be recast as active (due to the dual function of the passive voice in Japanese: polite indirectness)

I don’t know any other languages well enough to comment, though I suspect isolating languages such as Chinese have their own issues, which are different again from those at the polysynthetic end of the spectrum.

What about English? English falls somewhere in between extremely isolating and extremely synthetic and for that, English writers are lucky.

Here are a few things I don’t like about English; things which often need recasting in revision due to the general clunkiness of our grammar.

WHOM

This word isn’t inelegant in its own right. Rather, it’s on its way out. So, to use or avoid?

If I do use ‘whom’, I am making the choice to sound slightly old-fashioned. If I make the choice to avoid it, I’m also making a statement – to be modern –  and the sentence sounds a little wrong. So I must rewrite the sentence and recast the grammar, to avoid making a decision either way.

DANGLING PREPOSITIONS

Again, this comes down to fairly arbitrary rules set down by people who wanted to maintain a stark distinction between the highly educated and the plebs.

There are times when a dangling preposition sounds ridiculous, as noted by Winston Churchill who wrote something like this in a margin once, when someone had gone to ridiculous lengths to avoid one:

This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.

But what if the sentence does not sound worse by avoiding the dangling preposition? What if it sounds fine either way? Do I dangle it or not? Either way, I have to make a choice: Do I want to sound like I read grammar guides on the toilet, or do I want to sound uneducated in grammar and thereby annoy the conservative pedants? There is no in between.

The Pluperfect

This issue is explained in detail over at Daily Writing Tips:

Let’s Hear A Little Respect For The Pluperfect

So, how to avoid writing a lengthy paragraph or story in the pluperfect? I agree that a story sounds no good when it’s littered with a bunch of ‘hads’ (in which you unavoidably up with a couple of ‘had hads’ in there somewhere).

If I’m unlucky enough to be writing a section of story which requires the pluperfect, I tend to write the first sentence of a paragraph in that clunky tense, then switch to simple past , in the hope that readers will pick up that we’re still in that tense, that we haven’t time travelled or anything… until notified otherwise. (Until a new paragraph, that is, when I must repeat the sorry saga over.)

THE PASSIVE VOICE

In fact, the word ‘had’ is generally hated, and the passive voice is another case in point. Luckily for those of us writing in English, it’s fairly easy to rewrite most sentences in the active voice, with no loss of elegance, meaning, nor shift in nuance.

So why do I find myself writing these damn passives so often? Through habit, I’m sure regular writers end up writing fewer passive sentences, but I still write too many in a first draft of anything. How nice it would be if the passive were not so widely hated.

HE OR SHE?

If only it weren’t rude to call a person ‘it’. If only. Instead, we must either write he/she (inelegantly), alternate he and she arbitrarily to avoid looking sexist, or recast all such sentences in the plural:

He who lives in a glasshouse shouldn’t throw stones.

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People who live in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones.

Sometimes you just can’t rewrite the sentence as a plural (because for technical reasons there is only one person, and you don’t know whether it’s a he or a she.) What then?

Just use ‘they’? Even though the plural doesn’t agree with the singular? This is done frequently though it never sounds great. (See three sentences down for a naturally occurring example.)

An interesting article on this issue from The Awl

UNIVERSAL YOU

You hear this a lot on disaster documentaries. Ever noticed? Someone has miraculously escaped a bush fire and afterwards, in an interview, they’ll say:

You never thought it was going to happen to you. You could see the wall of flame coming closer and closer and you knew you were going to die and you…

I can understand why disaster survivalists might switch to universal you in interviews. When something is very hard to talk about, it’s easier not to talk about it in the first person.

What about in writing? (Good writing, that is?)

My own preference: When writing of one’s own experience, use first person pronouns. It’s just more honest.

See there? That sentence I just wrote? That throws up another thing I don’t like about English: It’s impossible to use ‘one’ as a universal pronoun without sounding like the Queen of England.

INTRODUCING RESTRICTIVE CLAUSES: THAT, WHICH, WHAT, OR LEAVE IT RIGHT OUT?

I really hate this one. I really do. This is the single reason why I don’t write with my Microsoft grammar check turned on. I get rude green squiggly lines all over the show. Every time I introduce a restrictive clause with ‘that’ it tells me I should be using ‘which’, or vice versa, or something. Apparently there are rules. But I don’t know. It’s regional.

I do know what sounds right to me, but I’ll be damned if I can explain it. (Ask a native Spanish speaker to explain que and cual – you’ll be equally flummoxed!)

Anyway, what sounds right to me, in my particular dialect of English, does not sound right to English speakers from other parts of the world, yet we all consider ourselves native speakers.

It would be very nice if English didn’t require anything at all at the beginning of a restrictive clause, and oftentimes we can leave that/which/what/whose etc right out and the sentence sounds better for it. (Especially if the word ‘that’ has already been used, for example, as a demonstrative in the same sentence.)

Then there are other times when the sentence sounds incomplete unless a relative clause is signposted with an interrogative pronoun. So I can’t just go plum leaving them out.

What to do? Write in your own dialect, I suppose, and accept that these words are subject to much regional variation, and you’ll never please everyone. (Unfortunately for me, I come from a country of 4 million English speakers, and another million ex-pats whose English has been corrupted, so I’m never going to win an argument based on numbers.)

THE SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD

If you’ve ever learnt Spanish in a classroom, you probably want to wring its miserable little neck, but we do have this in English too, you know. I think it’s on its way out. About four years ago I was teaching a New Zealand story to a bunch of New Zealand teenagers (who were about ten years younger than me) and after reading the story, I put a series of questions up on the board. One of the questions was:

How might the story be different if it were set in England?

I used to dish out sweets for any mistakes I made on the board, so one girl raised her  hand and said, ” ‘Miss, don’t you mean ‘How might the story be different if it WAS set in England?’ “

That was my first clear indication that the subjunctive mood is on its way out. To that group of young people, the subjunctive ‘were’ (in a hypothetical sentence including ‘if’) definitely sounded wrong.

To me, the subjunctive mood still sounds better. How can that be? Should I keep using it? How many years do I have, before my writing makes me sound like a dinosaur?

Don’t answer that.

Proofing Peeves

Anyone who practises self-editing on a regular basis may relate to this: There are certain things that just get on your wick. Sometimes these little things don’t seem to bother anyone else. Let’s call them idiosyncrasies.

Some people can’t abide ‘alright’. Others can’t bear ‘O.K’ spelt ‘okay’. Others insist that ‘scepticism’ is spelt ‘skepticism’ or vice versa. More and more people avoid the semi-colon.

Here are my own bug-bears. Some of them, I know, are peculiar to me and hardly anyone else.

1. The comma-splice

(Using a comma in place of a full-stop to create the illusion of a connection or a fluidity between two separate sentences.)

I’m slowly learning to live with this one, but I seem to have a strong sense of a sentence: ie. where one starts and where I think it should end.

I don’t mind the comma splice so much in dialogue, because dialogue in fiction is never a true representation of speech at the best of times, and the comma-splice kind of symbolises that. Put it this way: I’d rather see a comma-splice in dialogue than the semi-colon, because the semi-colon feels too formal for most fictional dialogue.

Some writers make much use of the comma splice and readers don’t mind. Maeve Binchy, case in point. I love her stories but the comma splice in some of her novels really gets my goat.

2. Overuse of the sentence fragment

Sentence fragments wear on the reader because we must fill out the rest of a sentence in our heads in order to make sense of it. Also, if a sentence has had its head lopped off, starting in middle, the reader has expected a different grammatical pattern to follow, and is often forced to mentally recast the syntax. Too many sentence fragments feel like a cheap way of finding some sort of literary, poetic voice.

3. The single-sentence paragraph

If you’re going to draw that much attention to a single sentence, it had better be a rip-snorter.

Unless you’re writing for the internet, in which case I’ll happily read your single sentence paragraphs because of the pleasing negative space.

4. Firstly, secondly, thirdly

I prefer first, second, third. No need to make these words sound more like adverbs. They’re fine as they are.

As  you were.

Alright is All Right with me

I had an English teacher who taught me that ‘alright’ is never all right in written language.

It has taken me a long time to get over this. For the past 17 years since I escaped from Mrs Common’s Year 11 English, I’ve been tripped up by ‘alright’ every time I see it. Something in my brain requires that I slow down my reading. I mentally edit ‘alright’ into two words. This is very annoying. (I do the same with absent and misplaced apostrophes.)

But if alright is good enough for Tim Winton, it’s good enough for me. I recently read The Riders, and his prose is full of alrights. A finger up to traditionalists, perhaps?

In fact, the distinction between ‘alright’ and ‘all right’ is a useful one. Meaning is clarified rather than obfuscated, so logically, there’s nothing wrong with it:

‘Your end of term paper is alright.’

‘Your end of term paper is all right.’

If we were to officially accept ‘alright’ into formal English language, the difference between those two sentences would be clear and unambiguous.

After all, there’s nothing wrong with ‘maybe’. When did ‘maybe’ become a single word, anyhow? Were the prescriptive grammarians up in arms, telling people that ‘may be’ must be written as two words? When did to-day become one word? To-morrow?

Let’s just say it’s a feature of English evolution: New words are sometimes formed by taking closed-class words and banging them together. Just because they’re closed-class words doesn’t mean they’re immune to fiddle-faddling. Is this the real problem here?

Anyway, I’ve officially given up caring. (I suspect smokes would be an easier habit to kick.)

A PS and An Admission

I still don’t write ‘alright’, not even in fiction dialogue. This is as a favour to any traditionalist readers who would be momentarily tripped up. I’ll give them another 20 years to come round.

Trends in Capitalization

“Interesting capitalisation,” I said.

“Yeah. I’m a big believer in random capitalisation. The rules of capitalisation are so unfair to words in the middle.”

- Margo, from Paper Towns by John Green

Sometimes the smallest copy-editing thing starts me thinking. What are the capitalization conventions for titles and also for made-up compound names in fiction? Does it depend on publishing region? On individual editor? Is there a trend? Should I follow it?

As Nicholas Hudson puts it in Oxford Modern Australian Usage, ‘There are really only two uses for capitals, plus one freak.’ (There is a crumb in my keyboard, under the ‘k’, as usual.)

The Rules:

1. Start of a sentence (also start of direct speech)
2. On labels (proper nouns, titles)

The Freak:

On words which no longer (or never had) a connection to a proper noun e.g. frankfurter, teddy bear, sandwich.

I wouldn’t capitalise any of those, but people used to, before we all forgot that Frankfurters were named after a place, that Teddy bears were named after a guy called Teddy and that the Earl of Sandwich was very fond of his bread.

Here’s a useful word: ‘capitonym’. This is a word that changes its meaning depending on whether or not it starts with a capital. e.g. The Church, the church (the organisation vs the building), God, god (monotheistic God vs polytheistic god).

All of this is very interesting but what I want to know is: Which words of a title are you meant to capitalise? All of them? Or just the words that carry lexical meaning (ie not ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘of’ but all the other kinds)?

Capitalization in Titles

It depends on house style. Wikipedia says so, and here’s a detailed and lengthy explanation.

Do what you like. I think titles look better when every word is capitalized. That’s my egalitarian nature kicking in, you see.

Made-Up Compound Names in Fiction

For compound names, it seems there’s no rule. You can either capitalise the first word and not the following, or each word in the name which is not a determiner or preposition:

• Dmitri-the-bully (The Road Home, Rose Tremain)
• Pete-the-Post (The Riders, Tim Winton)

TRENDS IN CAPITALIZATION

There’s no doubt about it, capitalization conventions have been changed by email and internet:

1. CamelCase – influenced by programming languages and iPod and MySpace.
2. A trend back to capitalisation of Important Words, often used to highlight irony or something a bit ridiculous: ‘After our Big Night Drinking I had one Hell of a Hangover’. This feels less annoying that sticking everything in single quotes, but has pretty much the same effect.
3. A trend towards americanisation (which the spell checker tells me requires a capital). American convention is to use sentence case for a full-sentence that follows a semi-colon: This is an example.
4. Famous names in lower case, perhaps started by people such as k.d. lang. Does it sound egocentric these days, to capitalize your own name? (Look at me, look how important I am!) Again, usernames have their own rules. (None, except a minimum number of characters.) It’s probably more to do with ‘minimalistic functionalism’ or something like that. It’s faster to type, in other words.
5. This year a lot of web designers seem to be including chunks of text using ONLY capital letters in slab typfaces, which have come back into fashion after 200 years (think ‘wanted dead or alive’ posters, often combined with some sort of calligraphic font.

I haven’t decided whether Australians spell it capitalisation or capitalization. I think it’s probably with an ‘s’, but Google redirects to capitalization. Ah, the power of Google.

The Yoda Effect

Nathan Bransford calls it the Yoda Effect and here is his explanation for it, ripped straight off his blog:

What is the Yoda Effect? Well, I’m sure there’s a proper grammar name for it, but it’s basically when the verb and subject are reversed in confusing fashion. (“Judge me by my size, do you?”, “Impossible to see the future is.”)

And that’s why I recently sat through Star Wars, for the first time ever. I was missing out on all these cultural references.

‘The Yoda Effect’ is good enough for me, but how exactly do we avoid it? (These are crappy sentences that should never see the light of day in a story, but it doesn’t matter for our purposes.)

- Avoid sentences beginning with -ing clauses.

NOT: Munching on a scone, he started to drive away.

INSTEAD: He started to drive away. He still hadn’t finished his scone.

NOT: Tugging on the rope, she secured and knotted it.

INSTEAD: She tugged on the rope, secured it, knotted it.

(I’ve been reading too much Peter Temple and commas are contagious.)

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- Position the subject of the main verb early in the sentence.

NOT: The sulphurous smell of eggs lingered as Pete whispered in Molly’s ear.

(The basic sentence is ‘Pete whispered’. Pete is the subject of the verb ‘whispered’. When the writer puts that first, the reader finds it easier to read.)

INSTEAD: Pete whispered in Molly’s ear. The sulphurous smell of eggs lingered.

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- Keep things chronological.

NOT: She had only just put on her lippy before Pete’s car pulled up in the driveway.

INSTEAD: Pete’s car pulled up in the driveway. She had only just put on her lippy.

NOT: After getting inside the car, Molly wound down the window to examine her hair in the wing mirror.

(Again, the dreaded -ing phrase. This is why -ing phrases are to be avoided.)

INSTEAD: Molly got inside the car, wound down the window and examined her hair in the wing mirror.

NOT: Her fear subsided when she discovered she hadn’t left her curlers in after all.

INSTEAD: She hadn’t left her curlers in after all. Her fear subsided.

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