Category Archives: Mechanics

Oh, the intricacies of grammar and mechanics

Mechanics

For the love of commas!

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Get ready for Writing Wednesday tomorrow!

This has bugged me for a long time (I actually have a draft about this from a year ago), and I don’t know how much help I can really be, and I did just post something kinda ranty on Monday—but the time has come. I must take a stand for and against commas.

Okay, mostly just for the proper use and against the incorrect use of commas. (Note: we’ll be using the linguistic convention of marking incorrect sentences with an asterisk.)

When you DO NOT need a comma

  • When you are using a title with a name

He is not President, Barack Obama. You are not author, Jimble Berry. The comma implies we don’t necessarily need the element, that the sentence would be complete without it. But Barack Obama isn’t the only president ever in the history of the universe.

If the title can’t stand by itself, do NOT put a comma in there. You wouldn’t say:

*I had lunch with president!
*You spoke with head chef.
*Vice president fired him.

Thus, you wouldn’t use a comma there: I had lunch with President, Obama. VP, Wilsher fired him.

  • Kinda the same thing: when the thing after the comma isn’t the only example of the the thing before the comma

This might be easier to illustrate with examples:

*Last night I watched the television show, Jeopardy!.
*My sister, Brooke, had a baby three weeks ago. [I have three sisters. And one new niece!]

The comma in the first sentence indicates that Jeopardy! is the only television show. At all. Ever. I didn’t know that. As addictive as Jeopardy! is, I’m not sure how I waste so much of my life in front of the television if that’s the only show ever. But hey, when my turn finally comes up, I’ll know answer question to that question answer.

When you use a comma there, it means that “the television show” and “Jeopardy!” are the same thing. But the “the” is equally culpable, since that means there’s only one. So it’d be fine to say, “I was watching Jeopardy!, a television show, last night . . .” (You know, if you were on Mars and talking with someone who didn’t know what Jeopardy! was.)

  • When you’re using multiple adjectives that modify one another or that must read in that order

*I have a bright, red dress.
*She loves her Marine, drill, instructor boyfriend.
*Two, old, men played chess.

The first would be correct if your dress is both red and bright—but if you’re trying to say it’s a bright shade of red (which I’m guessing you are, unless your dress has LEDs), you need to drop the comma. Unless it’s a red, bright dress.

The second and third examples illustrate the other point. The commas tell us the order of these adjectives could change: that’s your long, old, dirty shirt could be written with those adjectives in any order and still make sense. “Her instructor, Marine, drill boyfriend” and worse yet, “men, old, two played” don’t work there.

  • Between an adjective and its noun.

Along with example #3 from the last round:

*I have a big, fish.
*He likes raw, bacon.

I hope this is obvious!

  • Between a subject and its verb

This doesn’t include phrases set off by commas, though.

*President of the United States Barack Obama, gave an address yesterday.
*The biggest problem here, is that we don’t know what a subject and a verb are.

(Note that if you added a “the” to the beginning of sentence 1 and a comma before “Barack,” you’d have it right!)

When you DO need a comma

  • When you’re using a title with the

The “the” makes it grammatical to drop the name, so you need commas to set it off.

The President of the United States, Barack Obama, addressed Congress.
He was fired by the vice president of internal sales, Jim Ferrera.

It would be okay to drop the names from these sentences: “He was fired by the VP of internal sales.” So the comma is necessary.

  • Kinda the same thing: when the thing after the comma IS the only example of the the thing before the comma

Again, easier to illustrate with examples:

Last night I watched the longest-running Broadway musical in the history of all time, Springtime for Hitler.
My middlest sister, Brooke, had a baby three weeks ago. [She’s in the middle of my three younger sisters. That makes her middlest. I reserve the right to make things up.]

Just like above, if you can completely drop the element, it needs to be set off by commas.

  • Between interchangeable adjectives

If you could say the adjectives in another order and still have a grammatical sentence, use commas:

Your old, long, dirty shirt stinks.
Your dirty, old, long shirt stinks.
Your long, dirty, old shirt stinks. (Wash it!)

  • To set off a dependent clause.

These clauses can’t stand alone as sentences. They include participial phrases, clauses of time and other modifiers.

Walking out the door, she noticed how scuffed the frame was.
When he woke up, he found a shiny nickel.
She hopped down the stairs, yelping all the way.

However, when these elements are in order in the sentence (i.e. not moved to the beginning), you don’t need one:

He found a shiny nickel when he woke up.
She held up her hands as she backed away.

It might seem complex, but with practice and meticulous self-editing, you really can become a comma wizard. Don’t give up on grammar or claim that it’s someone else’s responsibility!

When do commas stump you?

Photo credits: Obama by Floyd Brown; laundry by supermayd

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Mechanics

My favorite word

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My favorite two words might be “The End”—but that’s not what we’re talking about right now!

My favorite word in the whole world is cream. Yep. I like the word. I like the roll of the ‘c’ and the ‘r’ at the back of the throat and the smooth finish of the ‘m.’ I like the smooth richness the word connotes. I like cream soda and ice cream—I even want to try an egg cream (though carbonated chocolate syrup doesn’t sound that good to me).

Lately, I’ve found myself pausing over another word: flavor. After reading a hilarious essay on “flavor” as an ingredient, I’m increasingly wary of “artificial flavor,” “natural flavor” and most especially the ambiguous neuter, simply “flavor.”

Flavor. Fllllavor. Flavor. Flavor. It just starts to sound weird. Flavor.

Plus, it’s funny:

funny pictures of cats with captions

Somehow, I don’t think it’s a coincidence my favorite words have to do with food.

What are your favorite words?

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Mechanics, Technique

The building blocks of writing

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I like the Food Network game show Chopped. It’s cool to see the unusual ingredients the contests must use and the amazing things they make with them. The competitors are experienced and/or trained chefs. They know everything about the tools of their trade, from the knives to the appliances to the techniques to the ingredients.

Although they’re probably not planning a flash fiction reality game show any time soon (darn!), we writers need to know the tools of our trade just as well—perhaps even more so, since we don’t have the excuse of a 20-minute time limit or a set of necessary ingredients we’ve never seen before. One of the ingredients we always need is grammar.

It’s not optional! We know, obviously, we’re not going to get published with dozens of dangling modifiers and comma splices littering every page. “I have critique partners who’ll catch all that,” claim some aspiring authors. That’s a very worrisome attitude for someone who calls himself a writer, trying to argue that grammar is 1.) not important enough to learn and 2.) something I can shuttle off onto someone else.

If you want to be a writer, grammar is YOUR job.

Imagine if a cook wanted to become an executive chef, but he absolutely refused to learn knife techniques, or how to use a frying pan, or what a risotto should taste like. Would you take his goal seriously, or would you think he wasn’t really dedicated to it?

But, our imaginary cook argues, when I’m an executive chef, I’ll have other people to do those things for me. The people who’re beneath me. Yeah, he will—but he’ll also have people he’ll need to teach. And if they mess up, they’re not going to be the only ones held responsible.

If you have your name on a published book, writing and the English language are your business—even if you want to claim you’re only a storyteller. People will think you know something about those subjects. (Duh, I know this isn’t always right, but they’ll assume it anyway.) How are you going to feel (and look!) if someone asks you a basic question and you can’t answer? Or what if you can’t tell good grammar from bad and you pass along something unreadable to your agent or editor? What will they think?

Grammar is not impossible—and it’s not optional. You don’t have to learn the exact definition of a periphrastic tense (though obviously it might come in handy if you’re my CP 😉 ), but it’s my opinion that you should be able to construct a coherent sentence. You should be able to tell the difference between a complete sentence and a fragment. For the LOVE, learn to use commas and apostrophes correctly.

We all make mistakes—but we all need to try not to. That might mean learning to write excellent grammar on the first try (and I do believe that can be learned!), or it might mean a rigorous self-edit. Critique partners and copy editors will always help, but the primary responsibility—and effort—should come from the writer himself.

What do you think? Is grammar important? Could you use some grammar instruction?

Photo by Robert Johnson

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Mechanics, Technique

Dialogue: the bare essentials

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This entry is part 1 of 8 in the series Dialogue

Cool note: this is my 300th published post on this blog!

There’s so much to be said about dialogue. (Oh, wow—totally unintentional pun!) Some of us do it well naturally—we have an “eye” for dialogue. (And it drives us CAH-RAZY to see bad dialogue in published books.) But we all have different strengths—and we all have things to work on and learn.

The barest basics of dialogue are the simple mechanics, in no particular order. (Because, hey, we all have to start somewhere!)

  1. Make it clear who’s speaking.
  2. As a corollary for #1, change paragraphs when changing speakers. (Not necessarily every time someone begins speaking—see #4.)
  3. Use actual speech attributions (verbs like “said”) sparingly, and default to the near-invisible said and/or asked as often as possible.*
  4. Use action beats to help identify the speaker (among other important purposes). Keep those action beats in the same paragraph as the speaker, and if you involve more than one character in the thoughts or beats, make sure it’s clear who’s speaking.
  5. Do not use action beats as speech attributions. Or, as Annette Lyon put it in a guest post here, “Stop smiling words.”
  6. Punctuate thusly (American style): “I can’t do this,” she said. [comma, followed by a lower-case letter for the speech attribution]

    “But you have to.” He rubbed his hands together. [Always a period there! Always a capital next! This is an action, not a way to speak.]

    “Really?” she asked. [question mark, lower case for the attribution]

    He nodded. “Really, truly, Johnny Lion.” [Again, use a period for the action.]

    “But—” [Em dash, no comma or period—but if this was a question, you would put the question mark in. Just to make it hard on you.]

    “No buts. I know—” he glanced around furtively—“you wish you weren’t here.” [Although this one may vary depending on the house style.]

*This is actually one I don’t particularly follow. A couple weeks ago, I read something I wrote ten years ago, and I found almost no speech attributions. In fact, I only used speech attributions if the way someone spoke was important—and couldn’t be conveyed through the dialogue (i.e. whispering, sarcasm, etc.). But I’ve also taken that too far, and sometimes it’s hard for my readers to tell who’s speaking. So I’m slowly learning to slip in those little invisible saids without twitching. Too much.

Tomorrow: what goes between the quotes!

Is dialogue one of your strengths? If so, share your best technique, trick or advice—in a guest post!

Photos by Leo Reynolds

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Mechanics

Comparing notes on paragraphing

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There is at least one hard-and-fast (mostly) rule for paragraphing in fiction: when you change speakers, change paragraphs. But from there, things can get a little complicated.

If you have a character react to another character’s dialogue without speaking, does that get a separate paragraph? What if the first character continues speaking? Or, to use an example, how would you paragraph this (we’ll call it Exhibit A), assuming it’s the same person doing all the talking:

“That’s the stupidest blog post idea I’ve ever heard.” He scowled at his sister. She rolled her eyes heavenward and sighed, as if begging for the patience to endure him. He took her by the shoulders. “You’re only thinking like this because you’re editing.”

I don’t know that one way is better than another—it mostly depends on what you want to emphasize, and making sure your meaning’s clear. Interestingly, I’ve read a couple books published in the 1950s and ’60s lately, and there seems to have been a rule that every time someone starts speaking, you need a new paragraph, so this example might be:

“That’s the stupidest blog post idea I’ve ever heard.” He scowled at his sister. She rolled her eyes heavenward and sighed, as if begging for the patience to endure him. He took her by the shoulders.

“You’re only thinking like this because you’re editing.”

Which I find confusing, since I think the paragraph change is setting up a speaker change, and it’s not. (And that might be precisely why they’ve shied away from that.)

Along those same lines, I made sure to include (in this totally-made-up-not-for-real example) a sentence that brought the speaker back into actor position before the second part of his dialogue to try to make it clearer who was speaking. (This may or may not be successful. We would assume it’s him because we haven’t changed paragraphs in the first example, but if the sister’s action was the last sentence before the second part of the dialogue, it might be hard to parse who’s supposed to be speaking. While we may want to “challenge” our readers, we probably don’t want to challenge them just to understand what’s happening 😉 .)

And then there’s narrating internal monologue. How do you think you’d do this in Exhibit B?

Terrence looked up as soon as he heard the hollow clack of high heels in the vestibule. Andrea came tripping in to the chapel, casting her eyes about hopefully. Terrence read people for a living. The way she leaned forward, her eyebrows drawn up inquisitively: she was eager to see him. And she only knew him as a lie. He suppressed a sigh.

How about Exhibit C?

Angelica nearly missed the meeting. Why she’d spent so long fussing over her hair was beyond her. No amount of fussing had ever made it behave particularly well—and she shouldn’t be so concerned about how she looked. She was lucky to reach her seat before the presentation began. But she was glad of the fussing as soon as they began the introductions—and she knew Mr. Griggs was there. She hadn’t seen him yet, but she could almost feel his presence. Or maybe his eyes on her.

How would you add paragraph breaks to these examples (if at all)?

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Mechanics

The art of paragraphing

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Part of the reason why paragraphing is so tough is that there aren’t as many rules governing it—but then, that leaves it open for us to play with paragraphs to great effect. Paragraphing can affect meaning and pace. It’s a powerful tool that I, for one, want to learn to wield better.

One way I’ve found I try to use paragraphs to better effect is to write a paragraph of a character reasoning something out, then break to give the conclusion:

Maria shook her head. Jimmy couldn’t have stolen the diamonds. It wasn’t possible. But the passer-by was talking to the policeman, so they were both innocent. The heiress was in the kitchen, flirting with the maitre d’. And Constantina was returning a book to the public library.

That only left Jimmy.

Note that we still organize paragraphs around the same topic. Here, this set of paragraphs are all about Maria ferreting out the suspect in the case of the missing diamonds. The first paragraph, especially, is organized around a central theme. It could even have a topic sentence: “Maria sorted through the possible suspects.”

And like in nonfiction, there’s a logical progression and coherence among the paragraphs. Here Maria (rather quickly) goes through an actual logical theorem of sorts, persuading herself from the emotional denial (“Jimmy can’t have done this”) to what she knows must be true (oh, but he did).

In reality, I’d break up that first paragraph between “It wasn’t possible.” and “But the passer-by . . .” Which is the exact kind of thing that made me want to write this post: why do we paragraph the way we do? I think in this example, I want to change paragraphs because she’s almost “changing sides” in her mental argument: “A is true” versus “But A cannot be true.”

I could see an argument for breaking there and then joining “That only left Jimmy” to that paragraph, too. It seems to come down to how dramatic we want that conclusion to be. (And I have a sneaking fear I’m an overdramatic paragrapher!)

What do you think? How does art play into paragraphing? How does “art” play in to your paragraphing?

Photo by Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.com

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Mechanics

The science of paragraphing

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How’s that for nitty gritty?

Usually in school, when we learn what a paragraph is, it has a fairly standard definition: three to five sentences, the first being a topic sentence and/or thesis, and the others relating to that topic. The last sentence should usually offer some sort of segue into the topic of the next sentence to show the logical structure of the overall essay. (In the first paragraph, the last sentence is the thesis of your work.) And that’s a great structure—for non-fiction.

In fiction, paragraphs are still important, but unfortunately they’re not quite as easily defined. We aren’t simply relating information or crafting a persuasive argument—we’re trying to make a cohesive narrative come to life.

There is at least one hard-and-fast (mostly) rule for paragraphing in fiction: when you change speakers, change paragraphs. Beyond that, we’re left with . . . more like “guidelines.”

One of those extremely important guidelines is clarity—break paragraphs to make your meaning clear. Breaking a paragraph between speakers is one reason why we do this. We might also break a paragraph to better illustrate the relationship between the character’s actions: showing cause and effect, for example.

Also, breaking a paragraph can help keep POV clear. I thought it was rather clear whose POV we were in in one scene that I wrote, so the POV character could comment on other characters’ dialogue in the same paragraph as the speech. My CPs found paragraphs like the made-up one in bold below confusing POV:

Lisa leaned back in her seat, trying not to look like she was eavesdropping. They were talking about her—again.

“Well, we were going to tell her.” Oh, really? Like when?

As we read, we need white space to help our minds psychologically space out information. We can use this to great artistic effect (as we’ll talk about tomorrow!).

What do you think? How do you paragraph? How would you paragraph this example?

Photo by Xosé Castro Roig

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