Category: English

One of my major pet peeves when reading something is encountering words used incorrectly. Of late, a word I have been seeing more and more in incorrect contexts is “whom”. Continue reading “Ruminations on Writing: who vs whom”

One of the things I see all the time in style guides and writing courses is a focus on formal writing. This does make some sense since most people will be writing formal documents at one time or another. Unfortunately, this focus does not produce a well rounded writer. A style that makes sense for an academic assessment of historical events is uncomfortably stuffy and restrictive for recounting the hijinx from a recent fishing expedition.

Even when writing courses do discuss appropriate styles for the target audience, they tend to simply gloss over what that really means. Often they will have a quick discussion about appropriate word choice. There are cases where writing “It behooves us greatly on this most auspicious occasion…” is appropriate. But there are also cases where writing “Good job we did that, eh?” is more appropriate. (If you’re wondering when one would ever use the first one, think comedy.)

For most formal settings and many informal settings, the rules taught in writing courses do, in fact, make sense. The introduction, body, and conclusion structure of an essay also works well for a speech. Arranging paragraphs with a topic sentence, body sentences, and a possible concluding sentence makes sense in most cases, too. These structures are a good way to keep the text organized and understandable. Rather, where those structures break down is when it comes to narrative writing.

If writing courses focus on anything other than formal prose, they usually focus on poetry. Poetry has its own rules and generally attempts to violate as many rules as it can. Well, that’s not strictly true, but the styles used for poetry have little to do with prose and, as such, it is not helpful for anyone attempting to write narrative prose.

Narrative writing is a completely different thing to writing formal papers or speeches. There are different overall structures though the general introduction, body, and conclusion structure can be used successfully. Usually taught in English classes is the “introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, conclusion” structure for a story. That, too, is a useful structure. Where the courses fall down is that they fail to provide any real guidance on how to structure the prose itself. Instead the focus on the structure of the overall work and they only do that so that they can set the students exercises in analyzing what someone else wrote. That is hardly conducing to learning how to actually write a narrative unless the student accidentally learns something from reading.

Most notably, in narrative writing, the formal paragraph structure is useless. It can serve as a guideline, but it generally cannot be strictly adhered to. With a narrative, there are many factors which confuse the situation, not least of which is that fact that a narrative combines many different types of text at the same time. It is quite common to encounter a brief opinion essay, possibly as internal monologue, followed by an extensive set of quotes from various sources, followed by a detailed blow by blow accounting of a fight somewhere. Within the narrative, various sections may adhere to various formal guidlines. Speeches by characters may follow a typical speech format while an infodump discussion the nature of farming in the back of beyond may read like a formal essay.

Fortunately, there are reasonable guidelines that can be followed for narrative writing in English. These are, however, just that. For every recommendation, it is fairly trivial to construct an example in which the recommendation is less than ideal.

Foremost, understand formal writing. There will be many cases in the course of writing narratives where the formal structure recommendations will make perfect sense. In those cases, it is perfectly acceptable to follow them. In fact, the rules of punctuation and sentence structure do not change between formal and narrative writing even though a narrative has more freedom to bend those rules as needed. Even the rules for quoting sources in academic literature generally translate to the purpose of representing dialogue in a narrative. After all, dialogue is simply quoting a primary source, in academic parlance. Stick to the rules as much as you can without compromising the flow of the narrative and you will tend to be on the right track. Also, if you do not understand the rules, you cannot understand the impact of breaking them if you choose to do so.

There is one thing that formal writing guidelines like to present as an absolute. That is a proscription of the passive voice. This may be a result of backlash against political doublespeak and various other face saving and ass covering behaviours. Passive voice can often be used to obfuscate just who is doing what and it often weakens a statement’s impact. However, passive voice is often appropriate. It depends just what aspect of the statement is important. For instance, consider the following. I could write “the car was flattened by a falling rock” or I could write “A falling rock flattened the car.”  The former emphasises the flattening of the car while the latter emphasises the fact that a falling rock did it. Neither is incorrect. Use whichever is appropriate in the context.

The most difficult thing writers encounter is deciding how to construct paragraphs. When reading, the choice often feels random, though when the authore gets it wrong, it can be quite jarring. A general rule of thumb is to group related sentences in a single paragraph. For instance, sentences describing the room that the character just entered would make sense as a single paragraph, at least if there is a lot of description. On the other hand, if each item examined by the character is described in excruciating detail, one might reserve a paragraph for each item. Or, if the character only makes a cursory examination of the entire building, that entire examination may be one paragraph. The general goal is to prevent paragraphs from becoming too bulky without having every sentence become its own paragraph. For this reason alone, paragraph breaks are something of an art form in narrative writing.

There are, however, a few guidelines for paragraph structure that should be followed unless there is a very good reason to break them. First among them is that each time the speaker changes in a dialogue, begin a new paragraph. It is rare that quotes from multiple speakers make sense appearing in a single paragraph, though it does happen on occasion. The practice of ending a paragraph each time the speaker changes has become such a common practice that readers tend to expect it and will be thrown if the expectation is not met.

Another well established tradition is to break the paragraph whenever the point of view character changes, or whenever the narrator’s attention switches to a new character. Mixing point of view characters in the same paragraph tends to be confusing. It is worth spending a few extra words or a few extra lines to avoid this confusion.

Finally, paragraphs should not span multiple pages, and, if avoidable, should not take up the majority of a single page. The longer a paragraph, the longer a reader has to wait to find a convenient breaking point to stop reading. Even if the reader is not intending to take a break, reaching the end of a longish paragraph affords a convenient place to pause and regroup mentally. Even if the paragraph reads comfortably and does not seem to drag on, paragraph breaks also serve as a means to keep one’s eyes in synch with the text. The longer a paragraph goes on, the harder it is to reset to the correct line at the left margin. Paragraph breaks give visual cues along the left margin that make aligining on the next line easier. Remember, the system that controls our eyes is imprecise and only locks in on particular locations through a feedback system. The more information that feedback system has to work with, the less effort it takes to synchronize. Of course, how this works out depends a great deal on the typesetting and format of the end product. Also, if a paragraph really does need to be massive, as sometimes happens, there is no reason to artificially break it.

There are other things that should be considered when writing a narrative, but most of those are the same as any writing. Make sure you use words correctly. Spell words correctly. Use punctuation correctly. Keep your writing as clear as it can be. And most of all, proof read your work (something you will likely discover I failed to do on most things on this blog).

Recently, I’ve seen quite a few instances of “fumble rules” and other things discussing writing style. This got me thinking about some of the “rules” that are bandied about for style and grammar. I’m going to pick on a few of those rules over the next while, I think.

Before I get into the rules, I think it would make sense to establish a vocabulary for doing so. I’m going to use a number of terms in these commentaries that may not be clear to all my readers. They certainly weren’t clear to me when I started this. I should make it clear that my definitions below may vary somewhat from the definitions used by a linguist. I am not a linguist and I find linguists to be singularly unhelpful in understanding any language.

First, we have the “classic” parts of speech which are simply labels to classify the function of words.

noun. This one should be clear and is about the most obvious definition for a part of speech ever. A noun is a word representing a specific thing, tangible or otherwise. Nouns are thinks like “cat” or “love” or “group”. They also include names (or “proper nouns”) such as “Fred” or “Edmonton” or “Earth”.

pronoun. A pronoun is really just a word that takes the place of a noun which has possibly been inflected in some way. Thus, an pronoun may behave like a noun but it might also behave as an adjective. For instance, “he” would behave like a noun, but the possessive form “his” would behave like an adjective, just like any noun inflected to be possessive.

verb. This is the other obvious part of speech. A verb is a word representing an action. While that action is normally something like running or thinking or eating or hating, it may be somewhat more abstract as represented by verbs like “be” or “become” which represent a “state of being” or associate a description with a noun of some kind.  This particular dichotomy arises from the general structure of English; there is no reason that a verb construction need be used to do the linkage. That just happens to be how English does it.

adjective. An adjective is simply a word or phrase that adds description to a noun. For instance, “fat cat”, “slow car”, “green leaf” and so on all have adjectives before the nouns.

adverb. This is something more confusing. An adverb (or adverbial phrase) modifies the action in some way. That is, it describes when or where or how the action occurs. To further confuse the issue, adverbs can also modify adjectives though if you squint at it carefully, you can realize that adjectives are really describing an action – the state of being as described by the adjective.

conjunction. A conjunction is simply a word or phrase used to join different sentences or phrases together.

preposition. A preposition introduces a phrase describing position or manner. It serves much the same purpose as a conjunction but at a lower level. Words such as “to”, “under”, “beside”, and so on often serve as prepositions.

article. An article is really just an adjective when you get down to it. In English, you have “the” which is the “definite” article and “a” or “an” which is the “indefinite” article. These are used so commonly that it makes some sense to label them separately. Other languages have a much larger complement of articles. A definite article indicates that the following noun phrase is a specific instance of the noun while the indefinite article indicates that the noun phrase is only one instance of a the noun.

interjection. An interjection is simply an emotional outburst that usually stands on its own. It generally ignores any other rules of proper grammar.

Labelling words as a particular part of speech is something of a problem in English. This stems from the fact that much of English is positional rather than inflectional. That is, rather than modifying the word to change its function in a sentence, it can often simply be relocated.  For instance, one could write “a door for a man” in which case it is clear that “man” is a noun. Or, one could use the more common phrase “man door” which means the same thing except that “man” is now serving as an adjective, describing a type of door. To further add confusion, one can “man the pumps” where “man” is now a verb meaning to apply ones own energy to operating the pumps. These are both examples of “zero derivation” in which a word of one type is repurposed to act as another without modifying it in any way. Of course, English also has inflections which are useful in many circumstances. One of the most common is the “-ly” suffix used to convert an adjective into an adverb.

Even though words can usually be labelled as one of the above parts of speech in English, there are cases where that just doesn’t work. Notably, in cases where a verb is multiple words. Let’s consider the example of “go” and “go out”. If you remove “out” from “go out”, you actually change the meaning. The difference is sufficient that “go” and “go out” can be considered distinct verbs. “Out” is not describing “go” in any way but, rather, is part of the verb itself. This is much like “to” in the infinitive form of a verb. Most references I have found seem to agree that “out” in “go out” is an adverb, but my contention is that it is nothing of the sort. That leads to another definition:

particle. A particle is simply a word serving a functional purpose. It may or may not actually behave like a part of speech. The “to” in an infinitive would be a particle. So would the “out” in “go out”. Indeed, one can take the definition to extremes and consider every word that serves as part of a larger unitary construction as a particle. Words that form parts of various verb conjugations, such as “will” or “shall”, while often considered to be verbs, are really particles as well.

There are a few other words I’ve tossed around above that could stand definitions, too.

derivation. This is simply the act of forming a new word from previously existing words by adding affixes or compounding words, or, in the case of zero derivation, simply using the old word as the new one.

conjugation. This is the act of modifying a word for its grammatical function. This is usually used in the context of verbs describing the formation of various verb tenses, voices,  and moods from the base verb form. The conjugation may vary depending on the subject, object, or even sentence position. In some languages, other types of words also conjugate, often adjectives.

mood. This is an obscure term used to describe the context of the action. Such things as “interrogative”, “indicative”, and “infinitive” are all moods. Except to linguists, this term is largely meaningless in English and can be folded into the notion of a “verb tense”.

voice. Grammatically, voice describes the releationship between the verb and its subject and object. If the verb is being done by the subject, this is active voice. If the verb is being done to the subject, this is passive voice.

tense. Strictly speaking, this describes the temporal relationship between the action and the doer. In English, that means past, present, or future. Other languages may have other tenses. In practical terms, mood and tense are often conflated or combined mentally.

inflection. Inflection is simply modification of a base word to fit into a particular function. Examples are verb conjugation and pluralization.

affix. An affix is simply an addition to a base word for some purpose. The addition may be at the start (prefix), in the middle (infix), or the end (suffix). It may even include more than one addition.

suffix. An addition to the end of a word. Generally denoted by a leading hyphen, such as “-ly”.

prefix. An addition to the start of the word. Generally denoted by a trailing hyphen, such as “un-“.

infix. An addition to the middle of a word. Generally denoted by both leading and trailing hyphens.

There are a couple other terms which are likely to come up at some point:

first person. This refers to the speaker or writer. In English, “I”, “me”, “we”, and “us” are all first person.

second person. This refers to another person in proximity to the speaker in some way. This is usually the person being spoken to or the reader. “You” would be second person.

third person. A third person is a person distinct from the speaker or the listener and is often not party to the communication. “he”, “it”, “they”, “them”, etc., are all third person.

singular. This means exactly one, as you would expect. Grammatically, it means the word itself is treated as singular even if it is notionally referring to multiple things. Singular forms are often used to refer to zero as well, depending on context.

plural. This means more than one. It may also refer to zero depending on context.

There will likely be other terms that show up. I will attempt to define those as they do. However, now that we have something of a vocabulary, I can safely proceed with my various ruminations next time.