51

(29 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

njc wrote:

I'll go further.  To the extent that you are writing in a close PoV, the narrator's vocabulary and some grammar choices should reflect the character, using words that the character might use, because it that character who is being represented by the words.

But it is hard to see how the I/me issue arises there.

Huckleberry Finn and Flowers for Algernon are exceptionally good examples of narration in non-standard English, and common in non-standard English is the I/me issue being defined as the improper use of subject (I) versus object (me). Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave...  but Twain does not begin the book with You don't know about I.... There is a logical consistency to a non-standard English of a vernacular, a kind of grammar of its own, that works within its own fashion because it is logical. John Hamler here does that here on TNBW.

52

(29 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

vern wrote:

I would be one of the last persons to render a verdict on the technically correct use of I vs me, but I do know what sounds natural in conversation and as Temple has pointed out quite rationally, the example used to start this thread ain't it. Take care. Vern

Of course, I would ask a foreigner how to speak English in a natural way.

53

(29 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

alkemi wrote:

Doesn't it depend on who the narrator is? If he was an English teacher, he might talk in a grammatically correct way.

What is so unusual about narrating in a proper fashion? Saying only an English teacher speaks English in a grammatically correct way is like saying only a man of the cloth acts in a moral way. Unless an affectation of subculture is depicted through narration, speaking in a grammatically correct way is correct because by definition grammar is the logic of syntax, semantics, and morphology people have spoken in  the language for generations. I actually think it is offensive to suggest that a writer ought to try to not use proper grammar as is the current practice among non-fiction publishing editors to force de-gendering the universal personal pronoun "he/him" by mixing it up with "she/her."

Charles_F_Bell wrote:

Disagree. It is capitalized in every English speaking country when preceding a name (President Trump)  and when used with the honorific "Mr." in exactly the same way it is "Her Royal Highness" and not "her royal highness."

...and...  Xyr Royal Highness and Mx President for any gender dysphoric Head of State of the Commonwealth and United States, respectively.

Kdot wrote:

Hi Norm... I believe you're seeing something I've discovered on this sit is that the US and Canada have different rules for capitalization. For example:

"Wow, Mr. President, that’s a good one"
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/us/p … tweet.html

in the US is probably not capitalized because he's really just "one president of many".

In Canada, it definitely is capitalized:

Disagree. It is capitalized in every English speaking country when preceding a name (President Trump)  and when used with the honorific "Mr." in exactly the same way it is "Her Royal Highness" and not "her royal highness."  What is debated by confusing: "The President is at the White House"  with "The president of Mobil Oil Corporation is at the White House," or "The president is at the white house" as if it is any president at any house that is painted white.

56

(29 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

Use of "I" is correct and natural to native speakers of proper English. The parenthetical nonessential dependent clause "who is...," while correct, is unnatural in dialogue and is what probably makes the final "I" awkward. However, if the speaker is speaking in a pseudo-formal fashion like a cop, it is appropriate.

njc wrote:

Fair enough, Temple.  Charles has a fair argument.  I don't think it invalidates mine, but we understand each other's and are not likely to convince each other.

But I would like Charles to explain why the sample from Ringoe does not make full use of the power of the progressive aspect.  It seems to me that the mixture of progressive and what I read as copula-with-participle-for-predicate-adjective expresses a static, timeliss quality appropriate to the scene.  I'd like to know why he thinks I'm wrong.

Allow me to repeat myself:
Only three sentences of twelve containing the word "was" were past progressive sentences. The sample is overwhelmed with 10% of its content in "was" and that is poor writing.  Could not possibly know what static timeless quality is and certainly in any case not the purpose of progressive construction usually reserved to a period between the present and the past as in: I was thinking of the kind of pie I ate that you always enjoy baking.. That is a good use of the progressive in a short sentence. Not static but moving forward as "progressive" means. [going forward or onward; passing successively from one member of a series to the next; proceeding step by step.] If you want "static" use simple past tense and the writing would improve in deletion of three of the surfeit wuzzes.

njc wrote:

As you wish:

Why does this matter? The answer to this question has been provided by Hegel in his Master/Slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit, and was subsequently taken up as a fundamental theme of Marx's own thinking.

When people are forced to create their own material world through their own labor, they are certainly not setting out to achieve a greater insight into the nature of reality - they are merely trying to feed themselves, and to provide their children with clothing and a roof over their heads. And yet, whether they will or no, they are also, at every step of the way, acquiring a keener grasp of the objective nature of world. A man who wishes to build his own home with his own hands must come to grips with the recalcitrant properties of wood and gravity: he must learn to discipline his own activities so that he is in fact able to achieve his end. He will come to see that certain things work and that others don't. He will realize that in order to have A, you must first make sure of B. He will be forced to develop a sense of the realistic - and this, once again, is a cultural constant, measured entirely by the ability of each particular culture to cope successfully with the specific challenge posed by the world it inhabits.

But all of this is lost on the man who simply pays another man to build his home for him. He is free to imagine his dream house, and to indulge in every kind of fantasy. The proper nature of the material need not concern him - gravity doesn't interest him. He makes the plans out of his head and expects them to be fulfilled at his whim.

If we look at the source of the Arab wealth we find it is nothing they created for themselves. It has come to them by magic, much like a story of the Arabian nights, and it allows them to live in a feudal fantasyland. What Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have in common is that they became rich because the West paid them for natural ...

The topic is the realistic and unrealistic ambitions of states, the causes, the results, and the dangers of such unrealistic ambitions.  You may disagree with the analysis, but it's strong enough to call for refutation, not mere dismissal.

Not sure if you mean to show example of where Marx was ever right (apart from some trivialities) by way of Hegel who was deeply wrong about everything, but Marx as an economic socialialist took the flawed economic aspect of the Labor Theory of Value from Adam Smith and ran with it to disastrous conclusions.

The rest of the garbage is by Bobbitt?  I have mentioned he will start his statement leading to falsehood with some obvious bits of truth ... the nature of building things, etc. ... to garbage he will assert without connection. (He will be forced to develop a sense of the realistic - and this, once again, is a cultural constant, measured entirely by the ability of each particular culture to cope successfully with the specific challenge posed by the world it inhabits.)   Why should not one dismiss it, for there is no basis in reality for it, and it exists by mere assertion. And then finish with a common sense statement that in fact has nothing to do with his assertion - that Arab wealth was created by means of transfer of information and technology from a foreign culture then stolen in whole by socialism. The indigenous "culture" involved is that of Mohammed who directed that if you need to steal from the infidel, do so. You will  not find a DC swap dweller like Bobbitt saying that.

Read Francis Fukuyama for contrast still within the collectivist perspective.

njc wrote:

Bobbitt does come to some bad conclusions.  He also comes to some stunning right ones, and the foundation notions of The Shield of Achilles qualify, IMO.

He writes in that tedious "Constitutional scholar" style elucidating the history of the Constitution (all the good stuff) then moves on to opposite conclusions (all the bad, modernist stuff) as if the two are connected. Essentially his opinion is not different than Bader Ginsburg: The old dusty Constitution is just too unworkable.

njc wrote:

Marx came to a few good conclusions too.

Name one.

njc wrote:

And all of this is beside the point.  Right, wrong, or incomplete, Bobbitt's assertions together carry a subtlety that is only evident once one plumbs the full meanings in the concepts carried by the words   To deny them because you believe the author dangerously wrong elsewhere seems dangerous itself.  An argument can only be dangerously wrong if it is deceptively wrong, and in an argument of many parts, it is likely that some of the lemmas will be both correct and of import

I am informed by his shorter articles over the years dating back to the Carter Era, and he is in the final analysis always wrong. I have not read The Shield of Achilles (besides the fact of 900 pp of blah, blah, blah) because I found out the title does not allude to the fact Homeric Greece came from 800 years of post-Mycenaean Dark Ages with principles of democracy and rule of law - antithetical to war, in fact, as Achilles was the first high-placed anti-war protester - but rather defending war so long as it is done correctly.

njc wrote:

If you consider the Shield of Achilles sample to be easy, then either you or I badly misread it.

Readability test would not test for comprehension so much as  the means of writing that can allow for comprehension. It is possible for someone who reads at college level and still cannot comprehend the material. I cannot divorce my mind from what I already know, so the sample from Bobbitt is easy enough for me to read (at lower college level as I would be in history and law) to conclude it is wrong because I know it is written by a creature who inhabits the academic subdivision of the DC swamp. Written by someone else I would want to thumb through the book to see what he has to say about Natural Rights expecting negativity or absence and, if so true, come to that same conclusion, or I would ascertain his position on historical determinism and if positive, not only deem it wrong but evil.

njc wrote:

The Monster Hunter: Memoir series seems to be aimed at people who enjoy adventure and fantasy, with a sense of humor for the great and small.  And gruesome and gross (but not in the "worms come in, the worms come out" flavor.  Education level has very little to do with it, except perhaps for people who refuse to enjoy spare ribs because hand-pampered Japanese beef is better.

Education has to do with the level to which this author writes, and content has nothing to with that statement of fact, except possibly in terms of targeted audience, e.g., children's book written at a child's level of education.

61

(2 replies, posted in Writing Tips & Site Help)

We'll burn that bridge when we get to it is not so a malaphor as a clever new rendering of an old metaphor.

or  They'll burn that cross when they get to it has an allusion to the KKK for racist intentions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/book … s-new.html

According to Mr. Booker, there are only seven basic plots in the whole world -- plots that are recycled again and again in novels, movies, plays and operas. Those seven plots are: 1.Overcoming the Monster, 2.Rags to Riches, 3.The Quest, 4.Voyage and Return, 5.Rebirth, 6.Comedy and 7.Tragedy

Only in the seventh plot type, Tragedy, he observes, is there a deviation from this fundamental pattern. Here, the hero or heroine also goes on a journey, but is "held back by some fatal flaw or weakness from reaching that state of perfect balance," he writes. "They are doomed to fall short of the goal because in some way they are stuck in a state of incompleteness or immaturity." Despair, destruction or death is often the end result.

njc wrote:

Charles, please credit IT people with a bit more depth than a seven-layer network model.  One of my semi-regular web reads wrote this recently:
[onecosmos-dot-blogspot-dot-com]

Still, apples v. oranges. As a generalization, maths, engineering, and computer science geeks have no sophisticated sense of literary appreciation, or humor, for that matter - not seeming to get irony at all. The exceptions abound in men whose minds beam in every direction like Roger Penrose.

njc wrote:

I didn't know the origin of Fletcher-Kinkaid.

I was having a dream. A really odd one. Generally my dreams involved a blonde on a beach who was very open-minded. In this case, I was standing on a dock on a lake. The water was a perfect blue as was the sky. There were hills on the far side and they were such a perfect green it was literally unearthly. It was, easily, the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.

I wasn’t alone, either. There was a guy sitting at the end of the dock trying to get his reel to work. It was obviously snarled. Next to him, to his right, was a bucket presumably filled with bait. And another fishing pole. The guy was wearing a T-shirt and ball cap.

There's a great deal more going on in that paragraph that the grammar alone can descriibe.  The word literally is used correctly.  The narrator, Olivier Chadwick Gardenier (Chad) is very mostly dead, and that old fisherman named Pete in the Saints ballcap is about to ask Chad to go back, black out from pain, and complete a mission of unknown length (but with suffering included), all with just one clue to what he must do.

With that knowledge, read again the adante description.  See how each note fits, sets the stage for what is about to happen.

Was it meant to be easy to read?  Yes.  Was crafted simply?  No.  Is there depth?  Yes.  Will the more careful or practiced reader find more to appreciate than the marginally literate?  Yes.

Illustrating a point that writing for a target audience is important, and the target audience being highschool dropouts, the thing bores me painfully. As pointed out, it does not accomplish the power of progressive-tense writing -- it is barely evident -- and violates a basic rule of good writing style in repetition of an auxiliary word (was) to extent of constituting 10% of the sum of the words used.
____________________

njc wrote:

Isn't this characteristic--that you appreciate it more as you understand more--one of the things we praise in music?

Repetition, the coda foreshadowed previously, perhaps, is a feature of music, but not repetition of a single note or invariant use of a phrase 12 times in less than a minute,

njc wrote:

Here's the last third or so of a paragraph from The Shield of Achilles:

... Until the governing institutions of a society can claim for themselves the sole right to determine the legitimate use of force at home and abroad, there can be no state.  Without law, strategy cannot claim to be a legitimate act of state.  Only if law prevails can it confer legitimacy on strategic choices and give them a purpose.  Yet the legitimacy necessary for law and strategy derives from history, the understanding of past practices that characterizes a particular society.

I expect that the Fletcher-Kincaid score of this paragraph will be very high, perhaps beyond four undergraduate years.  Yet the difficulty of the paragraph would not be fully captured even by a PhD level score.

I think you are comparing apples and oranges by fiction versus non-fiction. I will grant that Flesch predicts better for non-fiction than for fiction, and especially sophisticated non-fiction versus sophisticated fiction. The above scores 13th grade which is where I think it should be -  a college-student level. For a graduate student, it is easy. It is not sophisticated or complex but does use polysyllabic words. I also do not consider Dickens sophisticated, and I recall he was in the 8-12 grade level range.

Also, see here (puts Dickens at 8):
https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/readability/ … e_level/8/

12th graders are supposed to be able to read Berkeley.

If the grade-level prediction seems out of line with reality, the explanation is American education has degraded since the '70's when the test was developed.

Temple Wang wrote:

big-horse-droppings-on-an-asphalt-road-picture-

At least Empress Wu has stopped eating dogs and cats.

njc wrote:

Difficult grammar doesn't mean a sophisticated message.  Easy grammar doesn't mean a simple message.  Neither the grammar nor the message sophistication by itself tells whether the reader finds the story rewarding.

I have to disagree. My prognostication on the future of reading for the generation born after 2010 is that unless a novel can offer something other than the 7 basic plots (*) and tough competition from the visual means to depict action, the novel will be dead.  There is an intimate nexus of intelligence, education, difficult/complicated grammar, and sophisticated messaging to a certain kind of entertainment reward that certainly is not basic. Unless our culture (**) dies altogether there would be a profitable niche of intelligent, educated, nuanced-minded, philosophic readers.

(*) https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/book … s-new.html

(**) The so-called Whiteness Culture, irrespective of individual race, ethnicity, nationality, etc. in the sense that you do not have to be white to appreciate and acknowledge the value of Shakespeare, but you do have to be a racist to undervalue Shakespeare because he was white.


njc wrote:

I wonder how Fletcher-Kincaid would score the opening of =A Tale of Two Cities= or of =The Napoleon of Notting Hill=.

It would be interesting to put =The Shield of Achilles= through some readability benchmarks and then to compare the results to what people actually find difficult.  Ditto for the opening two pages of the preamble of Book 1 of =The Last Lion=, also asking what people find moving.  "In London there was such a man."

From my anecdotal experience of running through it high and low literature, so long as the sample is a paragraph or longer, it works.  For the last paragraph of my most recent story, which is a reworked version of the first paragraph of my first book, it gives a readability number: 16.32. That is in the middle of a college-graduate score of 0-30. A rational perspective understands my target audience is the college educated interested in a different sort of entertainment than is on TV or at the movies, though arguably at grad-student level, and I have to make no apologies or excuses for its style of complicated grammar.

j p lundstrom wrote:
Charles_F_Bell wrote:
j p lundstrom wrote:

Amen. The audience dictates the writing style. Which means we should know before we start for whom the work is intended.

"I was having a dream. A really odd one. Generally my dreams involved a blonde on a beach who was very open-minded. In this case, I was standing on a dock on a lake. The water was a perfect blue as was the sky. There were hills on the far side and they were such a perfect green it was literally unearthly. It was, easily, the most beautiful place I’d ever seen."
Flesch-Kincaid Grade = 4.48

"Like you know I was listening to my music when like the guy is staring at me, so I am telling him what the fuck, man, who is giving the right to go gazing on me like you king or something and am telling that loud, but he is gazing and staring and going all weird, so like you know it is telling me he is just crazy."
Flesch-Kincaid Grade = 25.85

We are amused.

https://www.online-utility.org/english/ … mprove.jsp

Hey, Charlie!
Not exactly sure what you're trying to say, but as long as it keeps you amused, we don't need to worry about you.

I broke the machine.

The language in my construction of unaffixed dialogue, which requires a unique, distinct voice in dialogue from each character, is that of a manic twenty-something black valley-girl NPR reporter - should I ever need that character.

All artificially intelligent means to access writing will break down at high levels of creative literacy.

So too, I suspect, does reading from an editor's point of view. Reviews as galley proofs are not really reviews. Complicated, grammar-licensed paragraphs in fiction have the intention to scramble and confuse the literal minded who can make great bureaucrats and IT personnel but not readers of literature designed to grow and activate brain cells.

njc wrote:

It's one of a number of readability metrics, none of which considers the innate difficulty of the topics.  It seems to be chiefly useful for improving the spew of regulation-writing bureaucrats.

No, it is not for the purpose of improving regulation-writing bureaucrats, but rather more to access the reading ability of military recruits who are likely required to read manuals rather than novels in their military duties. The "grade-level" score converts the "readability" score of 0-100 to a factor that is more tangible but also a bit more arbitrary. Readability in the middle range 50 means at a level of a high school graduate, and below (difficult) 0-50, college educated, and above (easy) at a level of the high-school dropout. Your sample from Mr. Ringo at score 80 is just above illiterate, and certainly that was my impression when I called it bad writing, but in terms you have expressed, well aimed at readers who just made it into literacy but would be rejects as recruits into the navy.

Bill Weldon wrote:
Charles_F_Bell wrote:

"Like you know I was listening to my music when like the guy is staring at me, so I am telling him what the fuck, man, who is giving the right to go gazing on me like you king or something and am telling that loud, but he is gazing and staring and going all weird, so like you know it is telling me he is just crazy."
Flesch-Kincaid Grade = 25.85

But who’d want to read such crap?

Why, hello “Bill Weldon”!  How are you feeling today?

j p lundstrom wrote:

Amen. The audience dictates the writing style. Which means we should know before we start for whom the work is intended.

"I was having a dream. A really odd one. Generally my dreams involved a blonde on a beach who was very open-minded. In this case, I was standing on a dock on a lake. The water was a perfect blue as was the sky. There were hills on the far side and they were such a perfect green it was literally unearthly. It was, easily, the most beautiful place I’d ever seen."
Flesch-Kincaid Grade = 4.48

"Like you know I was listening to my music when like the guy is staring at me, so I am telling him what the fuck, man, who is giving the right to go gazing on me like you king or something and am telling that loud, but he is gazing and staring and going all weird, so like you know it is telling me he is just crazy."
Flesch-Kincaid Grade = 25.85

We are amused.

https://www.online-utility.org/english/ … mprove.jsp

j p lundstrom wrote:
njc wrote:

The argument of audience versus art is a messy one.  (Or should I just write ' is messy'?). I don't have a final conclusion on the question, but if your purpose is to reach the audience, you might make different choices than if you hope to write for the ages, or if you are writing to see how far you can press the technique, or to flaunt your virtuosity to other writers.

Amen. The audience dictates the writing style. Which means we should know before we start for whom the work is intended.

intended for a reading grade of between 3rd and 4th grades.

njc wrote:

To the Fuzzy Wuzzy example: The repetition of the 'uzzy' is not accidental.  It's there for a specific musical/poetic effect.  It's not sophisticated, but neither is its intended audience.

Notice that the very first thing Ringo's protag/narrator says is 'I was having a dream'.  After that, he gives slow, smooth description.  And by using the progressive aspect, he emphasizes that the protag/narrator is immersed in the experience

So is this written for a -special- effect?  Or just for a -specific- effect?

The argument of audience versus art is a messy one.  (Or should I just write ' is messy'?). I don't have a final conclusion on the question, but if your purpose is to reach the audience, you might make different choices than if you hope to write for the ages, or if you are writing to see how far you can press the technique, or to flaunt your virtuosity to other writers.

Yes, the Fuzzy Wuzzy example is odd-sounding and grammatically tortuous not by accident. By that, it is actually sophisticated. Your author creates his mess by accident.

I won't point out the other mistakes and stick to the was issue. 12 of 128 words are "was" and if 10% of your words are the same word, you have a problem. Moreover, you claim this is about the progressive past tense when only 3 of those was's are used for that purpose, and the rest are simply past tense condition of being.

In the matter of style, your claim: "He emphasizes that the protag/narrator is immersed in the experience," is true, but all the more shows up that pitfall in first-person narrative. Within a character's dialogue, license can be made for ugly patterns of speech, or non-normative if you prefer, but an entire book or even large portions thereof in blah, blah of an ugly English is annoying.

Like you know I was listening to my music when like the guy is staring at me, so I am telling him what the fuck, man, who is giving the right to go gazing on me like you king or something and am telling that loud, but he is gazing and staring and going all weird, so like you know it is telling me he is just crazy.

Okay, fine. Let's do this occasionally, but narrate the whole book that way?

It is a guarantee that non-normative target audience does not read.

Running through a grammar/spell/style checker will not find any mistakes except perhaps "know" used too many times.

So like it is better than your sample, for sure.

njc wrote:

I get dinged in reviews over my use of the progressive aspect ("was standing", "were sitting") and my use of more-than-anorexic-minimum dialogue tags.  Without claiming that I'm perfect, I'd like to present two paragraphs of a modern, successful genre novel for study.

I was having a dream. A really odd one. Generally my dreams involved a blonde on a beach who was very open-minded. In this case, I was standing on a dock on a lake. The water was a perfect blue as was the sky. There were hills on the far side and they were such a perfect green it was literally unearthly. It was, easily, the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.

I wasn’t alone, either. There was a guy sitting at the end of the dock trying to get his reel to work. It was obviously snarled. Next to him, to his right, was a bucket presumably filled with bait. And another fishing pole. The guy was wearing a T-shirt and ball cap.

This opens Chapter 2 of =Grunge=, by John Ringo, set in Larry Correia's Monster Hunter universe.  Later in this chapter you'll find dialogue tagged almost as heavily as mine is, and only a little more gracefully

In some of the predicates in this sample you can argue, as I will, that the 'was' or 'were' is not an auxiliary verb indicating the progressive aspect, but a copula followed by a present participle acting as a predicate adjective.  In which case, you're adding to the number of copulas, and everybody seems to teach that copulas, if not actually as evil as the passive voice, have no place in good society.

I claim John Ringo's successful work as evidence on my side.

Will someone argue the opposite side?

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair. Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy, was he?

Too many wuzzes, don't you think?

Your sample from His Excellency John Ringo is a sample of bad writing. Have's, seems's, was's --- very simple sentences and yet glued together with filler words.

Your stuff isn't that bad. What you do, and 99.99999% of TNBW action-story writers, is trail your dialogue tags with participles: "Yeah, take that you big, bad meany," the big boobed female action hero said, swinging through the air and chopping off the heads of Gorgons and singing I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar while tightening up her rear quarters against unlawful teen-age judicial entry.

The cool thing about progressive past tense is to allow a writer to wedge an act in the past that is closer to the present than a related previous act. I was thinking of that piece of delicious apple pie I ate.  Such a construction can imply something important yet unsaid. ... I ate when you called and offered to bring over another pie.  I was thinking of coming over but... the rest left unsaid for politeness, perhaps. The construction "-ing of -ing" suffers from too many many "-ing" words in proximity, and I thought to come over but... is better but for fact that "Bill Weldon" will complain  the author is pretentious and self-indulgent.

74

(0 replies, posted in Literary Fiction)

I accomplished the tedious task of restoring the points to my TNBW writings. This forum does not require points, and I am not clear on a reason why it should.

75

(78 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

dagny wrote:

Charles,
Try John Sandford Prey series, or his Virgil Flower series.
smile

Thank you for the suggestion. At audible.com, so in November's list for me. Not keen on series, but okay if each book can stand on its own like  Adam Dalgliesh novels by James.