Category Archives: Mechanics

Oh, the intricacies of grammar and mechanics

Mechanics

The virtue of repetition

Is it just me, or does it seem like we’ve been trained never to repeat a word—resort to a thesaurus before you dare to use the word “mob” three times on a page (because “criminal organization” has that same punch, doesn’t it?). It’s like we’ve been programmed to excise all uses of the same word from our writing (thesaurus = well worn!) and, frankly, sometimes repetition is rhythmic and even lyrical. Parallelism—beginning multiple sentences the same way? Anathema!

Or, more likely, anaphora. Sentence- or phrase-initial repetition is an age-old rhetorical device:

Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition! — Shakespeare, King John, II, i

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right… — Abraham Lincoln

[W]e shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. — Winston Churchill

And that’s just one type of rhetorical repetition. I applaud repetition for a good purpose—cadence, humor, contrast. Lather, rinse, repeat!

Dwight V. Swain (Techniques of the Selling Writer, 33) points out the best way to make sure that your repetition is understood as intentional—the Rule of Three. Use something twice and it looks accidental, but go for the third time “and after, if you don’t carry it to absurdity,” Swain adds), and we have to assume you meant it.

Granted, we must also be careful we don’t overuse words and phrases. (Churchill’s full paragraph from that speech contains 11 “we shalls,” including 7 “we shall fights.” Was that overdoing it? Probably not—especially since that was delivered orally. Written out, it might feel a little less impressive and a little more redundant.) There are definitely times when we inadvertently repeat words. Crit partners (and Find & Replace—I’m loving Word 2007’s Reading highlight) are great for catching those.

When you repeat a word, do it on purpose. If there’s no better word for that situation, see if you can repeat that word for some effect—rhythm, sonority, humor.

What do you think? How do you repeat words—and make it clear you’re repeating those words on purpose?

Photo by Eric Tastad

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Mechanics

Who’s laughing now?

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Well, after all that tension, I thought we could all use some stress relief, eh? Every once in a while, after all, you do have to let it out.

The other day I was reading a blog post that mentioned making someone laugh. “Not just guffawing, but outright laughing,” they clarified (okay, that’s not what they said, but that’s basically the idea). But that note left me scratching my head: isn’t guffawing harder than laughing?

So today I bring you a game! From two thesasauruses (those are dinosaurs that know a lot of words), I gathered all the synonyms for laughter:

amusement
be in stitches
break up
burst
cachinnate
cackle
chortle
chuckle
convulsed
crack up
crow
die laughing
fit
fracture
gesture
giggle
glee
grin
guffaw
heehaw 		hilarity
howl
merriment
mirth
peal
rejoicing
roar
roll in the aisles
scream
shout
shriek
snicker
snigger
snort
sound
split one’s sides
titter
wakka wakka wakka
whoop
yuck

In the comments, let’s rank these from the most hilarity/hardest laughter to lightest. (And feel free to leave out ones you don’t know. “Cachinnate”?!) Note that this list includes both nouns and verbs.

Photo by Jackson Carson

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Mechanics, Technique

What’s your favorite “macro” editing technique?

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There are probably as many ways to edit a story as there are to write one. Today, I’m thinking about “macro” edits—looking at structure and scene placement, rather than the individual words and style.

One of my favorites has been the scene chart, inspired by a post on Edittorrent. The original post suggested creating index cards for each scene, listing a number of important features—everything from where and when the scene is set, to first and last lines, to “promises” made to the reader, to important details like descriptions. Then you could move the index cards around to resequence events or scenes, or play with the story without hurting your MS.

Like many of the commentators on the post, however, I used a spreadsheet to do this in a very small space. I also combined this with probably the most important thing I learned from Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure—the structure of a scene and the importance of a scene goal—for the character, not just me as a writer.

When I used these techniques together, I found that the scenes that lacked a goal for the character (or a unique goal, as opposed to one that the character’s had four times now) were often the unfocused scenes I needed the most work on—or to cut altogether. I could also bring out hidden scene goals, find new ones to add layers to a scene and strengthen the scenes by enhancing the goals, conflict and disasters.

So here’s an example of the kind of scene chart I used, partially filled in for an imaginary story (anybody recognize the plot? Hint: it’s from an old card game). I didn’t use all of these columns myself (and if any of them aren’t clear, feel free to ask what I mean).

That’s just one thing I’ve tried, and I liked it so well, I’ll definitely use it in the future.

What do you think? Do you use a form of scene charts? What’s your favorite “macro” editing technique?

Photo credit: Aaron Brown

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Mechanics

The myth of the serial comma

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The Oxford comma, or serial comma, is a standard convention in many publishing houses—but almost no newspapers. The serial comma is the final comma before the conjunction in a list:

Angela bought eggs, milk, and butter.

Some serial comma enthusiasts say that serial commas are required, and that the recent tendency away from serial commas is yet another sign of the deteriorating state of English literacy, blah blah blah. But the most common argument in favor of the serial comma is that it just takes care of so much ambiguity, such as in this famous example:

I’d like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

And yes, it’s true that if this person had used the serial comma, it would be clear that they didn’t use “Ayn Rand and God” to mean “my parents” (hello, apposition!). But let’s be honest—you knew what this person meant, didn’t you?

It’s just simply not the case that the serial comma always clears up ambiguity. How many people are in this list?

I’d like to thank my father, the man who saw me through so many hard times, and my mother.

Is “the man who saw me through so many hard times” the same person as “my father”? (That sneaky appositive again!)

And then there are even times when the serial comma can’t fix the ambiguity:

I’d like to thank Angela, my editor, and my wife.

I’d like to thank Angela, my editor and my wife.

So is Angela his editor, his editor and his wife, or neither?

What to do:
Use the serial comma—or don’t—as you’re used to (or according to your publisher’s style guide). Add it or remove it if there’s any ambiguity. And if that doesn’t work, reword. (I’d like to thank my wife, Angela, who edits my work.) Just don’t claim that one way is always right—because it’s not.

Do you use the serial comma?

Photos by Xavi Blanch and Leo Reynolds

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Mechanics

Stealing Word Nerd Wednesday!

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I am absconding with Annette Lyon’s popular feature, Word Nerd Wednesday! Mwahaha! And to totally misappropriate it, I’m posting on a Friday!

I think you now understand how I write from my villains’ POVs.And speaking of characters, and keeping with our theme this month, I wanted to focus on two specific words that many people use interchangeably: sympathy and empathy. I realized that, while I sense a difference, I can’t really say for certain what it is. So I turned to some dictionaries.

Sympathy
From Merriam-Webster: a “relationship between persons or things wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other,” “mutual or parallel susceptibility.” Also, the “inclination to think or feel alike.” The American Heritage Dictionary, via Answers.com, agrees: “A relationship or an affinity between people or things in which whatever affects one correspondingly affects the other.”

Empathy
From Merriam-Webster again: the primary definition is “the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it.” The other meaning is “the action of understanding . . . and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” The American Heritage definitions reverse the order: “Identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives” and “The attribution of one’s own feelings to an object.”

What’s the difference?
So let’s apply this to our characters. . . . Sympathy is an affinity between the character and the reader—when something happens to the character, the reader feels it. Or, to cut and paste one of the definitions again, it’s “the [readers’] act or power of sharing the feelings” of our characters.

Empathy, on the other hand, is the reader identifying with and understanding the character’s experiences and feelings, possibly to the level of vicariously experiencing them. Which, oddly enough, sounds very much like the same thing. However, Roget’s Thesaurus (via Thesaurus.com) gives an interesting distinction:

sympathy means the stimulation in a person of feelings that are similar in kind to those that affect another person; empathy means a mental or affective projection into the feelings or state of mind of another person

At the same time, it lists sympathy as a synonym for empathy and vice versa. So what is the difference? Let’s dig deeper: get out your etymology gear.

(Um, guys, what’s with the bee suits and the bug jars? I said etymology, not entomology. . . .)

Etymology
Sympathy and empathy aren’t just extremely similar concepts; they’re very similar words with similar roots. (This is a shout out to the great state of North Carolina, which required me to learn word roots my senior year of high school.)

  • em– is a Greek prefix that’s found in words like instill, imbue, endow and embed. As you can see from those examples, they all mean “in” in some way—to put in, to spread in, to place in, etc.
  • sym– is a Greek prefix found in words like symphony, symmetry, synesthesia and synecdoche (um . . . don’t worry about the definitions on those two 😉 ). Those examples aren’t the most transparent, but it means “with,” or “together.”
  • pathos is a Greek word meaning feelings—or suffering.

So empathy would be instilling the character’s suffering in the reader, while sympathy would be making the reader suffer with the character. Still sounds pretty similar, doesn’t it?

So, really, what’s the difference?
The bottom line: there really isn’t that big a difference between the definitions of empathy and sympathy. ‘Round these parts, I’ve used “sympathy” to denote the ultimate goal of “reader identification”—inducing the reader to feel what the character feels, and to understand those feelings deeply. “Empathy,” in this paradigm, would be one technique used to instill those feelings.

So happy Word Nerd Wednesday. On Friday. And here, instead of Annette’s blog. (And no, actually, I didn’t ask Annette’s permission. But now I ask her forgiveness. *bats eyelashes* Please? I did it as a favor when you said you were so busy you didn’t post WNW this week. And while this is no Ellis Island mythbusting, I hope that this is an acceptable offering.)

What do you think—is this a distinction without a difference? Or are their nuances in the commonly accepted connotations of “sympathy” and “empathy” that dictionaries fail to capture?

Photo by Steve Woods

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Mechanics

The lesser of two evils: weak verb or adverb use?

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I have a problem with smiling. And nodding.

enigmatic smileThee problem is this: there’s only a handful of words in the English language to express those actions: smile, beam, grin, smirk, simper. Nodding is even worse: nod. Other versions of this one tend to draw attention to the words instead of showing the characters’ actions: bobbed his head (“up and down,” if you want to make it even more annoying).

But the real problem here is that every smile and every nod don’t look like or mean the same thing. There are sinister smiles, eager grins, coy smiles, small smiles, half smiles, half smirks. There are greeting nods, indicating nods, assenting nods, effusive nods, reluctant nods, slow nods, quick nods.

Obviously my problem is not identifying the kinds of smiles and nods humans use. My problem comes from describing them in writing, because that’s against the rules. There are a lot of so-called rules in writing. As with anything with a body of ad hoc regulations, many of the rules contradict each other. Like these:

1. Never use adverbs. Ever! (Corollary: adjectives are bad; they are trouble!)

and

2. Always use strong verbs. Until you make yourself, your characters and your readers tired!

(We’ll talk more about Rule #1 another day.)

When do they conflict? I’ll show you. Consider:

He gave her a kind smile OR He smiled at her kindly

He shot her a bemused look OR He looked at her bemusedly

He gave his thumb a pensive chew (LOL) OR He chewed his thumb pensively

mmm lunchAnd do they need the forbidden modifier? I think so. Can you infer the meaning of his grin with just “He smiled at her”? (I have two images in mind here: “He smiled at her. Mmm. Lunch.” and “He smiled at her. Oh, a friend.”) A thumb chewer may be a small child seeking comfort, an adult pondering a problem or a guy with a nervous habit.

Now, of course, there are lots of other ways to show the intent behind nods and smiles. But setting aside all of the myriad other possible constructions, what do you think: which of the above contrasts are better? Which is the lesser of two evils?

Photo credits—Mona Lisa: Songkran; Jack-o-lantern: Joanie Cahill

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Mechanics

Verbs with muscle

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By Janga

Breathes there a writer with prose so perfect that she has not been told at least once to “show; don’t tell”? One of the best ways to follow this cardinal rule is to use strong verbs. Weak verbs are generic. They can be used in a wide range of situations. Strong verbs are precise.

walk vs pranceContrary to popular thought, not all action verbs are strong verbs. In the sentence “Ali walked down the road,” “walked” is an action verb. It is also a generic verb. It tells us that Ali is using her feet to advance across a surface and nothing else.

Skilled writers use strong verbs to reveal character and situation. If we change “walked” to a more precise verb, we show our readers Ali’s movements. “Strolled,” “pranced,” and “trudged” are just a few of the choices a writer might use to make Ali’s movement more vivid for the reader. Look at this passage from Judith Ivory’s Black Silk to see how a consummate artist shows a girl moving through a crowd.

The girl jostled her way through gripping hands and recriminations. She elbowed one man and grabbed another by the collar. She wanted to be in their midst. She was scanning the men’s encroaching, remonstrating faces, looking them over as thoroughly as they were trying to turn her about. After a minute of this tussle—the men would not organize themselves for her inspection—she clambered up over the edge of the billiard table, standing on it to look down on them all.

Strong verbs also help writers sidestep the adverb trap. Tessa Dare rightly observed in the “to be” discussion that adverbs used well can make prose more vibrant, but choosing a strong verb allows us to avoid graceless, adverb-heavy prose.

Let’s consider “Ali walked down the road” again. Suppose I have written this sentence as the first in a new chapter. I reread it, and I know that I need more. I recast the sentence: “Ali walked slowly down the road, as if burdened with the weight of the world.” By substituting a strong verb, I can cut a fifteen-word sentence to five words and eliminate a cliché in the process: “Ali trudged down the road.”

I confess that I am an overwriter, so I spend much of my revision time pruning my prose. Experience has taught me that strong verbs foster concise writing. Have/has/had phrases often signal wordiness that can be eliminated with a verb change. For example, if I rewrite “Lucia had had yet another argument with her mother” as “Lucia argued with her mother again,” I have cut the awkward repetition “had had” and exchanged a weak verb for a powerful one. In the original sentence, a strong verb (“argue”) is buried in a nominalization (a noun created from a verb or some other part of speech).

hayden flexesConsider this sentence: “Sari’s words caused Anthony great confusion.” The sentence is grammatically correct. Moreover, its meaning is clear. But how much more vivid and exact is the revised sentence “Sari’s words confused Anthony”? Or even better, “Sari’s words baffled Anthony.”

Some choices are stylistic, and they are intimately connected to the writer’s voice. But whether the style is simple and unadorned, lush and lyrical, or somewhere in between, the writer’s aim is vigorous prose. Cutting the “lard,” to borrow Richard Lanham’s term, and choosing verbs with muscle will move the writer closer to her goal.

About the author
Janga started reading her mother’s romance novels the summer she turned ten and has continued to be an avid reader of romance. Even a Ph. D. in English and years in academia were not enough to diminish her love of the genre. The enthusiasm of aspiring romance writers on the Eloisa James bulletin board refired her dream of writing a romance novel. She is in the process of revising her first mss, The Long Way Home, a contemporary with a Southern accent. She blogs at Romance Vagabonds and Just Janga.

Photo credits—Girl walking/prancing: Sanja Gjenero; Boy flexing: Jordan McCollum

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Mechanics

Verbs and Dialogue Tags: Or, Stop Smiling Words

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By Annette Lyon

If you enjoy this guest post, be sure to check out the series on writing dialogue!

Back in my days writing for a small newspaper, I often did book reviews. One day a publicist handed me a self-published book. It was a semi-autobiographical novel, and the concept seemed interesting. I looked forward to reading it.

That is, until I got about four lines into page one. The book was a mess from start to finish. Even though I read the thing about a dozen years ago, I could still rant for days on the all the problems in the book (let’s just say this guy didn’t have the first clue about how to put together a coherent story, let alone a coherent sentence).

One particular peeve still stands out: the use of funky verbs instead of normal dialogue tags. In the first chapter, I noticed that no one ever said anything.

They began, interrupted, rebutted, chided, complained, warned, replied, whispered, teased, mumbled, proclaimed, ordered, confessed, pressed, affirmed, announced, proposed, confirmed, suggested, and (some of my favorites) guiltily petitioned, sarcastically rebutted, and proficiently advised.

I could tell the guy had a thesaurus and was trying hard not to use “said.” The result felt ridiculous. Finding his goofy dialogue tags became a game for me. I wrote down every one from the first chapter.

The list had over 90 tags. Not ONE used “said.”

By this point, my eye was seriously twitching with annoyance. I have a sneaking suspicion that I also laughed out loud . . . several times.

Here are three basic rules for dialogue tags that this author could have really used.

Rule #1: “Said.” Use it 90% of the time.

It’s our happy verb.

While you don’t normally want to be repeating the same words over and over in your work, “said” (contrary to what this guy thought) tends to be invisible. It disappears while it helps the reader keep track of who is saying what.

Remember that you don’t need “said” (or any tag) after every single line of dialogue. If the speaker is clear, you can leave off the tag altogether. But when it doubt, use “said.”

Rule #2: If you decide to use a verb other than “said,” be sure it’s a speakable verb. 

For example, don’t do this: “These flowers are for you,” he smiled. 

Um, no. Smiles are silent. You can’t smile words. You can smile while speaking words. You can smile and then speak them. But smiles themselves can’t speak. 

Other non-speakable verbs often used as tags include sniffed, nodded, shrugged, and a hundred others. 

That horrific book I slogged through used “her eyes begged” as a speech tag.  

(Wow. Those are some pretty special—and loud—eyes.) 
 

Rule #3: Use actions (sure, even “her eyes begged”) when referring to dialogue.

Just don’t use it as a speech tag. Instead, put those action verbs next to the dialogue in their own sentences, complete with end-of-sentence punctuation. 

Otherwise, the action is the thing speaking, and we all know that’s impossible.  

So this would be just fine: 

He smiled. “These flowers are for you.”  

Or, use “said” and then add the verb next to it. So this works too: 

“These flowers are for you,” he said, smiling. 

Examples with actions only: 

Steve walked into April’s apartment and handed her a bouquet of roses. “These are for you.” 

OR  

He got down on one knee. “Will you marry me?” His eyes begged to know the answer. 

See? No speech tags at all. Even better, no funky verbs that can’t be realistically spoken. All we have are actions separated by clear punctuation like a period or question mark, plus dialogue we instinctively know belongs to the right speaker. 
 
If you use these three rules, the verbs in your tags will look far more professional—and they won’t give a reviewer eye twitches and a serious case of the giggles. 

So please, no more (hmm . . . let’s consult my list of 90-some tags from chapter one): stammering, grumbling, ordering, proposing, affirmed, or quizzing, what say?

Annette Lyon has been writing ever since second grade, when she piled pillows on a chair to reach her mother’s typewriter. A cum laude graduate from BYU with a degree in English, she has had success with newspaper, magazine, and business writing, but her first love is fiction. She was awarded Utah’s Best of State medal for fiction in 2007. Tower of Strength, her sixth and most recent novel, is her fourth historical centered around old Utah temples.

If you enjoy this guest post, be sure to check out the series on writing dialogue!

Photo credits—Reader by Chris Johnson; smile by jdurham123.

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