You mean the wrong kind of flatulence, sounds like.
Grammar Nazi
- Thread starter Moderator
- Start date
-
This message board permanently closed on June 30th, 2020 at 4PM EDT and is no longer accepting new members.
Some writer named Stephen King, in adopting language from some writer named William Faulkner, said, “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
Comma usage has definitely changed from when I was in school. Printed text has far fewer now. The most difficult thing I've had to unlearn is double spacing between sentences. My hand does it automatically, but industry standard now is a single space.
That's the reference. I've never really had that much trouble reducing my writing. It started in college with my essays. That's when I realized I must be a minimalist. I like the most effect from the fewest words, kind of like literary nutrient density.
It's second nature to single space now when I'm typing manuscripts but still revert to double spacing otherwise more often than not. Reducing the comma usage has been a struggle for me, too.
See? You remember about the comma before the "too" at the end of a sentence. I started realizing that I used way too many commas while reading sK. I kept thinking there's supposed to be a comma there, no? It took me a while to be able to read sK without a little confusion because of that.
Seems I recently read a CSLewis quote in which he used a ton of commas, like I was taught so long ago. I wonder if changes in English grammar usage tend to be universal, or if they're mostly in America.
Last edited:
Nirvana
On a first draft, words get "slang forth" on the page and I clean it up in edits. The first draft of my first book was over 265K words. Mr. King can get away with far more than that (lol), but it's pretty unpublishable for a first time, untried writer in a genre other than fantasy/sci-fi (and even those rarely go above 150K). By the time it went to print it was under 150K (and I now think it could be honed even more). I'm better about self-editing before it hits the page (or screen) now, but I don't worry too much about it.I took typing class about 1968, so it's been a 40-plus-year habit. But two things save me:
1) I don't have work worthy of publishing, so it's not an issue. And
2) With one "replace" command, I can change all double spaces in the document to a single space, so a manuscript full of spacing sin is wiped clean. Sorta like a literary baptism.
HAHA! I'm a compuphobe, so that's not as easy as it sounds for me
Reformatting is an exercise in fear and trembling.
I simply resist learning.HAHA! I'm a compuphobe, so that's not as easy as it sounds for me
I'm from Kentucky and made my mind up at around the age of 10 that I would write and speak correctly, no matter how everyone else around me talked! I had gone to Ohio to visit friends, and some neighbors asked my name. "Dana," I said. "Hi, Dinah, nice to meet you," they said. After that vacation, I made sure I changed my accent so that I sounded very northern. I quit using "y'all" and I started putting Gs on the ends of words like "walking" instead of "walkin." I say, "Fine," instead of "Fahn." When someone meets me for the first time, they never can guess where I'm from.
Finally, an editor made my day.HAHA! I'm a compuphobe, so that's not as easy as it sounds for me
I love it when someone younger than I (and everyone is younger than I) knows less about computers. Makes me feel young(er).
I notice this mistake all the time, even in SK's books:
There's several people who believe me.
You would never say There is several people who believe me, so if you're going to use a contraction here, it must be the contraction for there are (there're).
There's several people who believe me.
You would never say There is several people who believe me, so if you're going to use a contraction here, it must be the contraction for there are (there're).
I have a similar story. I was born in an area of Florida which did not include a southern accent. Dad was from Ohio and Mom from Maryland. Dad was transferred to Atlanta GA. Our neighborhood ended up with families from all over the place, Nebraska, New York, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Wisconsin. I'm not sure about the adults, but the kids learned tolerance and the lesson was easy. There were eight boys around the same age, two perfect four-man teams for all sports. I don't remember any of my friends speaking southern.
My two older sisters started dating southern boys who sometimes did have southern accents. Soon, my sisters were talking funny. I realized what was happening and I decided I wasn't gonna be like my sisters and stop talking my own way. It was easy enough since Atlanta has always been such a melting pot, but try to hold that resolve in Louisiana; or for that matter in Wisconsin or Michigan, where people talk even funnier. I think they're too close to Canada, is the problem. I'm grateful though, as all of that prepared me for Maine.
This is true, but an author will write how a given character will speak. Also, I believe there're certain exceptions allowed in English for slang as acceptable, if not technically so.
Yes, I don't mind grammar errors and slang in dialogue, but in the narrative it grates on me.
But if it's one of the accepted "errors" then it's not an error. I really dunno in the case of there's whether or not it's considered acceptable. But your point is well-taken, imho.
As tightly wound on rules as I must seem to be now, this particular transgression doesn't bother me because, even though it's incorrect, it's easier on the ear.
It's sort of like saying, "I wish that someone would take this corpse away, and they could keep it in their freezer for all I care." "Someone" is singular. "They" is plural. (You see the talent I have for stating the obvious?) They don't agree. But since we don't have a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun that works (other than the abominable "(s)he" or "she/he," which I translate to "she/he/it," which I then abbreviate to "sh/it"), we blend the number disagreement.
When I see a contraction like "there're," I start to think of sentences like, "There're rarer horrors than Aurora," and both my ears and tongue start to hurt. Although it would be a good (if painful) sentence for Japanese students to practice their English phonetics on.
Players of the SKMB game The Person Below Me (TPBM) are forced to do this - to use their or they even though in reference to a single individual - since no player necessarily knows the gender of the next person to play, and since we universally refuse to be forced into a disruptive-sounding rule. To use the plural with the singular, though technically incorrect, simply sounds more acceptable, and so is.
What frightens me in modern English usage is that certain mistakes seem to be have come to sound better to most than the correct ones. The word "less" is chronically used when "fewer" should be, for example. It bothers me no end.