See, this is why contemporary litfic eats ass. Their pointless gatekeeper "rules" are an attempt to strip all meaning and color from fiction writing, and we are all intellectually poorer for this literary burglary.
No adverbs because words that end in -ly are ugly. No words that end in -ing because they are annoying. Can't use the word 'said' to describe what was said, and can't use the word the because the the the the the the.
20% of my editing should NOT be deciding whether to OFFEND people with an Oxford comma!!!
Fuck, man. People get so caught up on words. It's almost like they hold the magic power to change people's hearts and minds. Wonder why someone would be afraid of that.
Thanks, Thaddeus, for standing up for language, and the beauty of ALL the words and their various suffix choices.
As an editor who often suggests their clients cut BACK on adverb usage (five in two lines is too many, and I've seen it many times as well.) But the general rule I believe, the one heuristic of a hill I will die on, or murder should it come to that, is a place and time for everything and a thing for every place and time.
I'm not a prescriptivist and I agree with you generally but I'd go so far as to say that experimentally in writing I'm running into completely competent writers from the level of officious grammatical style, which is the barrier to entry into the academy or the halls of the elite, but who lack any sense of style, control, or where punctuation in fiction may ought to actually go.
Because I'm not a prescriptivist but a lingual descriptivist and I'm having a problem with rhymes and half or incomplete rhymes lately but don't understand where it's coming from, I'd also point out that beauty can come from dissonance and contrast, which I'm sure Thaddeus will or has already gotten to, though all of his essays i've yet to be able to get read through, because I'm giving out a free five page dev edit a week and it's suddenly made me into a person people in some corners here listen to. (Along with my apartment exploding and trying to foster community not just around begging for money with my guts out under a stage light with my shirt sweated through.) Though, I'd suggest no one really listen to me if for no reason than sticker shock when they make an editorial inquiry and find out my $125 dollar non-negotiable reading fee is the least shocking thing about the sticker they're looking at. Because if I break it down by the second my hourly rate is $.0125 cents for every tick of the clock that I keep on my desk, and I do round that bitch up to the next full round cent. But, there are always special cases, I love what I do, I'm quite good at it, and I have a sort heart.
And if an Oxford comma offends them who the fuck are they anyway?
I come from the indies and I beg everyone on this platform, please, stop paying so much attention to the big five. Their lottery system was broken before all the mergers and acquisitions. (Together they hold over 650 separate sub-imprints)
But the best thing about this platform is people actually read, interact, and generally are thoughtful.
"No adverbs because words that end in -ly are ugly. No words that end in -ing because they are annoying. Can't use the word 'said' to describe what was said, and can't use the word the because the the the the the the." However I'd suggest that any editor worth their salt wouldn't prescribe such bullshit right off the blocks. Every writer has at least one personal syntax or two, some have entire internal grammars I prefer to lean into. I fucking hate these bland rules the MFA industrial complex provides, New York reinforces, and then heretics paywall claiming they're teaching you something I could have told you was charlatan bullshit before you read it.
But I've been around writing publishing and editing fiction 20 years, so in a sense, I get it.
Fuck there were too many near rhymes in that. I think I'm having a mental break.
Thank you so much for breaking these concepts down and making them accessible - not only the material itself (which I wish I’d had years ago!) but your decision to offer “scholarship” subscriptions.
If I manage to monetise my writing, buying a subscription to your Stack is my first earning goal. 😄
Funny, my MFA didn’t include that rule about -ing words. Maybe that was so far in the past that this newfangled rule hadn’t appeared yet. It’s clearly stupid.
I think you’re right that these “rules” grow out of people taking suggestions to an extreme (and all considerations of style are just suggestions, not rules).
That’s the case with adverbs and adjectives. Once, when someone was decrying Strunk and White for banning them outright, I thought to myself, “No they didn’t.” Then I went back and read: “Write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs.” Certainly sounds like an outright ban! While they go on to explain what they mean, it seems many people didn’t get past that first sentence.
Same thing with “to be” verbs. I think some teachers found it too difficult to explain what passive voice actually is, and so just told students to avoid is, are, was, and were. So there goes past continuous, as you’ve pointed out before.
Thanks for encouraging writers to avoid these extremes. That’s the only rule we should follow!
The more I read your essays, the more I realize why so many people don't write anything (letters, post cards, book reviews, etc.) when they should. Too many arbitrary rules. Anything overdone is overlooked. The same goes for rules.
Well, first thing first, my mother tongue is NOT English. For a foreign person, those sentences, written so short, look like the writer is really in a hurry.
Of course, when you are in an English class, they actually tell you not to write so long sentences because probably you're not going to be understood. In my particular case, those long sentences are a consecuence of being a lawyer: legal language has some oddities and one of them is precisely that legal documents normally are written with long sentences and complicated language. So, erm, I try to write with short ones, but normally... it's a lost battle.
Mastering the cumulative sentence is a good way to write (non-legal) long sentences that allow the reader to process the information. I appreciate you reading and commenting. Thank you.
I’beginning to read your essays on writing. I find them really interesting… I will be commenting although I can’t promise when I will be able to do It.
Agreed. Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, James Joyce, etc. etc. ad infinitum. Literary Fiction should not have to abide by rules it wants to break or ignore. There are sometimes consequences for breaking them (readability for some). But every writer can weigh the pros and cons of breaking the rules (or just not spend time thinking about them at all).
It's so often said that we learn the rules to break them, but the greater truth is that the rules we learn at first aren't as absolute as we believed. They were never meant to be so strictly followed.
See, this is why contemporary litfic eats ass. Their pointless gatekeeper "rules" are an attempt to strip all meaning and color from fiction writing, and we are all intellectually poorer for this literary burglary.
No adverbs because words that end in -ly are ugly. No words that end in -ing because they are annoying. Can't use the word 'said' to describe what was said, and can't use the word the because the the the the the the.
20% of my editing should NOT be deciding whether to OFFEND people with an Oxford comma!!!
Fuck, man. People get so caught up on words. It's almost like they hold the magic power to change people's hearts and minds. Wonder why someone would be afraid of that.
Thanks, Thaddeus, for standing up for language, and the beauty of ALL the words and their various suffix choices.
😂 Thank you!
As an editor who often suggests their clients cut BACK on adverb usage (five in two lines is too many, and I've seen it many times as well.) But the general rule I believe, the one heuristic of a hill I will die on, or murder should it come to that, is a place and time for everything and a thing for every place and time.
I'm not a prescriptivist and I agree with you generally but I'd go so far as to say that experimentally in writing I'm running into completely competent writers from the level of officious grammatical style, which is the barrier to entry into the academy or the halls of the elite, but who lack any sense of style, control, or where punctuation in fiction may ought to actually go.
Because I'm not a prescriptivist but a lingual descriptivist and I'm having a problem with rhymes and half or incomplete rhymes lately but don't understand where it's coming from, I'd also point out that beauty can come from dissonance and contrast, which I'm sure Thaddeus will or has already gotten to, though all of his essays i've yet to be able to get read through, because I'm giving out a free five page dev edit a week and it's suddenly made me into a person people in some corners here listen to. (Along with my apartment exploding and trying to foster community not just around begging for money with my guts out under a stage light with my shirt sweated through.) Though, I'd suggest no one really listen to me if for no reason than sticker shock when they make an editorial inquiry and find out my $125 dollar non-negotiable reading fee is the least shocking thing about the sticker they're looking at. Because if I break it down by the second my hourly rate is $.0125 cents for every tick of the clock that I keep on my desk, and I do round that bitch up to the next full round cent. But, there are always special cases, I love what I do, I'm quite good at it, and I have a sort heart.
And if an Oxford comma offends them who the fuck are they anyway?
I come from the indies and I beg everyone on this platform, please, stop paying so much attention to the big five. Their lottery system was broken before all the mergers and acquisitions. (Together they hold over 650 separate sub-imprints)
But the best thing about this platform is people actually read, interact, and generally are thoughtful.
"No adverbs because words that end in -ly are ugly. No words that end in -ing because they are annoying. Can't use the word 'said' to describe what was said, and can't use the word the because the the the the the the." However I'd suggest that any editor worth their salt wouldn't prescribe such bullshit right off the blocks. Every writer has at least one personal syntax or two, some have entire internal grammars I prefer to lean into. I fucking hate these bland rules the MFA industrial complex provides, New York reinforces, and then heretics paywall claiming they're teaching you something I could have told you was charlatan bullshit before you read it.
But I've been around writing publishing and editing fiction 20 years, so in a sense, I get it.
Fuck there were too many near rhymes in that. I think I'm having a mental break.
Thank you so much for breaking these concepts down and making them accessible - not only the material itself (which I wish I’d had years ago!) but your decision to offer “scholarship” subscriptions.
If I manage to monetise my writing, buying a subscription to your Stack is my first earning goal. 😄
I'm honored! Thank you!
Funny, my MFA didn’t include that rule about -ing words. Maybe that was so far in the past that this newfangled rule hadn’t appeared yet. It’s clearly stupid.
I think you’re right that these “rules” grow out of people taking suggestions to an extreme (and all considerations of style are just suggestions, not rules).
That’s the case with adverbs and adjectives. Once, when someone was decrying Strunk and White for banning them outright, I thought to myself, “No they didn’t.” Then I went back and read: “Write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs.” Certainly sounds like an outright ban! While they go on to explain what they mean, it seems many people didn’t get past that first sentence.
Same thing with “to be” verbs. I think some teachers found it too difficult to explain what passive voice actually is, and so just told students to avoid is, are, was, and were. So there goes past continuous, as you’ve pointed out before.
Thanks for encouraging writers to avoid these extremes. That’s the only rule we should follow!
Much appreciated, my friend.
The more I read your essays, the more I realize why so many people don't write anything (letters, post cards, book reviews, etc.) when they should. Too many arbitrary rules. Anything overdone is overlooked. The same goes for rules.
More and more, I see how rules are limited in scope, but we embrace them as absolute. That is certainly becoming a theme in these essays.
Well, first thing first, my mother tongue is NOT English. For a foreign person, those sentences, written so short, look like the writer is really in a hurry.
Of course, when you are in an English class, they actually tell you not to write so long sentences because probably you're not going to be understood. In my particular case, those long sentences are a consecuence of being a lawyer: legal language has some oddities and one of them is precisely that legal documents normally are written with long sentences and complicated language. So, erm, I try to write with short ones, but normally... it's a lost battle.
Mastering the cumulative sentence is a good way to write (non-legal) long sentences that allow the reader to process the information. I appreciate you reading and commenting. Thank you.
I’beginning to read your essays on writing. I find them really interesting… I will be commenting although I can’t promise when I will be able to do It.
PS: I’m sick of the spell checker… 😩
Agreed. Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, James Joyce, etc. etc. ad infinitum. Literary Fiction should not have to abide by rules it wants to break or ignore. There are sometimes consequences for breaking them (readability for some). But every writer can weigh the pros and cons of breaking the rules (or just not spend time thinking about them at all).
It's so often said that we learn the rules to break them, but the greater truth is that the rules we learn at first aren't as absolute as we believed. They were never meant to be so strictly followed.