Top 5 Grammar Mistakes, supposedly

I got an email from Grammarly.com recently about the "top writing mistakes that even the most seasoned novelists make in their work." Now, their methods did not particularly impress me and they haven't even attempted to prove that the writers sampled were seasoned novelists... but their list incited a few thoughts because I'm putting the final polish on Disciple, Part IV.

1. Missing comma
2. Run-on sentences
3. Comma splice
4. Comma misuse
5. Definite vs. Indefinite article use

This list was generated by their auto-proofreading software, so another grain of salt is in order. Still, there are some interesting points. 

#1 and #4 -- in my opinion, commas can be argued about. They're a matter of personal style, to some degree. I view them as a pacing mechanism in a sentence and I use them to indicate a very slight pause in a thought or in dialogue. That's on top of their mechanical functions in separating out lists and parceling clauses. For example: 

The corner store opened on time that morning, which was a first, and I bought a six-pack of beer.

Commas in that sentence enclose a clause which could drop out of the sentence without impacting its readability at all. "Which was a first" is an aside, an editorial comment, and when I read it I hear a slight pause as the narrator turns to look me in the eye and snark for a moment. If you drop the clause out...

The corner store opened on time that morning and I bought a six-pack of beer. 

...you don't need a comma, but I'm not nit-picky enough to complain of someone put one before "and." 

#2 and #3 are two manifestations of the same problem: badly built sentences. Of all the bad ways to build sentences, run-ons and comma splices seem the most obvious and clunky to me so either Grammarly's software can't reliably detect the rest or first drafts are messier than I thought. 

That store never opens on time, the owner's out drunk every night and too hung-over to get up. 

His beer selection is good though he gets that much right. 

Both of those sentences are so easy to fix that I had some trouble writing them incorrectly. Are these really so common? 

Which leaves #5: "a" and "an" vs. "the." This one is actually a good point because there's a power in the definite article "the." It assumes foreknowledge. Insinuates importance.

He was the knight for the job. 

Conversely, "a/an" de-emphasizes. It can completely shift the meaning of the sentence.

He was a knight for a job.

These are very subtle, too, since they're tiny words and very common.

I've put text into Grammarly a few times and yes, it's much better than Word's auto-correct. It certainly has the impartiality that can be helpful when you've been staring at a story for too long.

Whether it's good enough to sift out the finer points of definite and indefinite articles... mmm, I'd have to try it out some more. Has anyone here used Grammarly? What was your impression?

Subtle Things #6: How to feed the readers?

My (bad) habit of reading reviews for Disciple, Part I has dropped off considerably, but I still glance at them now and then. Those that have complaints tend to say things like "never explained anything" and, as a result, "couldn't get into it."

Okay. Valid point. That's the flip side of the "I don't spoon-feed my readers" coin -- some readers are starving for explanations.

And maybe I'm not so sensitive to that because I rarely feel starved for explanations, myself, when reading a book. I can appreciate details that don't need further exposition, and I'll wait for infrequent spoon-feedings of information. Mélusine, by Sarah Monette, was a bit of a smack up side the head, in that way. And that's probably a good thing. (Paperback available on Amazon.)

No spoons, here. Monette kept me hungry.

I read the prologue and it's a bit like getting thrown against a wall. The world-building is a mass of details and assumptions encoded in a dense (but engaging, thank goodness) voice.* The author throws down her gauntlet and that's your fair warning. A couple dozen pages in, when the few scraps of explanation raised more questions than they answered, the challenge was even clearer. Figure it out for yourself.

The fine line that Monette walked, though, is that I never doubted that what I needed was in there. Enough was intuitively obvious, coupled with minor scraps of definition, that I could build an understanding of her world even with what she didn't give me. And given that I could figure out most things, what became really glaring were the places she didn't give me enough to go on. I had to choose to not be annoyed about those.

How in the heck do you present an avalanche of world-building with enough structure to reassure people that they can run with it? It's one of those Subtle Things, and I've teased out this much: some of it is repetition in different contexts so you can see the pattern, some of it is careful coding using words you have to trust the reader to know, and some of it relies on intuition -- which can fall on its face.

Repetition with context: "flat"
The first time we see this word, it's: Kethe, spare me from flats. Second: She was a flat, sure, and she was spoiled, for damn sure... Third: [referring to dangerous neighborhoods] ...but they ain't places that I'd take a flat. Those are fairly context-free, but even so it's clearly an insult in the first line. Second time, it's put on par with being spoiled. Third time, you get a sense of social context. I caught on that it was the term for those who were not living on the mean streets.

Coded with trust: "septad"
Something they don't quite teach you in school: it behooves you to know the Latin (and Greek) prefixes for various numbers and quantities. You'll pick up a bunch by way of geometry (pentagon, hexagon) and computer literacy (gigabyte, nanosecond), but you really should learn the whole list of them. Monette's trusting that we all know septa- indicates seven. In Mélusine, "septad" is a multi-purpose word indicating a group of seven. Days, feet, coins, it doesn't seem to matter. It's never explicitly defined, and it doesn't need to be.

Intuition: colloquial phrases, "thief-keeper"
My personal favorite was: If she was any flatter, they'd be paving the street with her. Also, nutty as a box of squirrels. This was part of what made the voice so engaging -- colorful, yet intuitively graspable catchphrases. Mildmay supplies the vast majority of them.

"Thief-keeper" is another word that was used without explanation. It did eventually get some context, but it was obvious enough that it only needed minor modification: child thieves, in specific, like Fagin.

Too much to handle?
You do this all the time, actually, in everyday life: pick up details because of context and tone. If you know how people speak, and you can hear your characters clearly, these details will fall into place on their own. Mostly. It's something to tweak in revision. Good to be aware of, and good to keep an eye on, but being too deliberate or, God forbid, bending the dialogue to fit it, will only look clunky.

So, as requested, those are some of the thoughts that Mélusine stirred up. I gave it four stars over at Goodreads. I'm stingy with my stars, so that's an excellent rating for me. Wasn't five because the plot did get a little bogged down and hazy around the 2/3rds mark. But it's full of wonderful imagery, dripping with voice, and the world-building is excellent. Minor caution: it does include some sexual nastiness.

*In my brief Goodreads review, I mentioned how this book reminded me of A Clockwork Orange -- that's both because of how you're tossed into the lake (so far as the voice goes) and how the first-person narrator manages to be engaging in spite of that. Mélusine's voice is, in fact, more engaging and easier to read than Orange. Not least because even Mildmay is far more likeable than Alex...

Subtle Things #5: Reminders vs. over-repetition

I can't watch TV shows that insist on reminding you what happened earlier in this episode by running a short clip with a color tint, or in black-and-white. I hate it when authors repeat themselves. I got partway into the second Mistborn book and put it down because of repetition. Jacqueline Carey only gets away with it because her language is otherwise so awesome and Kiefan is itching to go a few rounds with Joscelin.

When does a reminder become too repetitive? For me, it involved repeating a fact three times within 500 words... made worse by too-obvious pointing at the thing through dialogue or in the narrative (see: Thank you, Captain Obvious)... or by ruminating on the same thing for a page every chapter... this isn't a hard and fast rule, of course. The smaller the fact, the easier to repeat without looking like it's being harped on. But you can go overboard with repeating even the smallest fact -- single words, as in Subtle Thing #3.

The other end of this problem is that you do need to repeat things that you want your readers to remember. It could be something as simple as a character's hair color, or a unique vocabulary word for your world, or an important bit of backstory. If it's been a long time (what constitutes a long time...?) since the readers have seen a character, reminding them what s/he looks like may be in order. The same goes for facts, vocab words, etc.

This is as tricky to illustrate as it is to define.

Writing this post gave me a chance to check on a sneaking suspicion I had: that I talk about what my main character's heart is doing. A lot. It's quavering, it's aching, it's sinking, it's tying itself in knots. Yes, it's a romance story and the heart is an easy stand-in for strong feelings, but anything can be taken too far.

In Disciple, Part II, there is an important, 3200-word scene in which Kate's heart is referred to five times. (I'm not counting physical hearts -- these are emotion descriptions -- though they add to the repetition.) Other scenes contain one or two, and top out at three in another important, slightly longer scene. 24 out of 40 scenes have heart references.

Too much?

Is that too much? I don't know. I could nix a few without hurting anything, though. This is a situation where one has to rely on one's betas, because chances are you aren't going to notice it yourself.

An example of necessary, repetitive reminders for my readers, from Disciple: Saint Qadeem. He's seen once, in Part I, but that's very brief. The readers meet him for a slightly longer passage in Part II. We spend a whole chapter talking to him in Part III, but then he disappears again. It isn't until Part IV that he becomes a real presence in the story.

Saint Qadeem gets a physical description each of the times we meet him, in I - IV, and it trails off after that. I'm a sketcher, when it comes to physical descriptions, so these aren't long and they tend to emphasize what's relevant at the time. When we first meet him, in Part I, the most important things I wanted to get across were 1. he's ethnically quite different from everyone, 2. this is unnerving to a young girl like Kate, but 3. he's non-threatening.

Later, Kate is more openly curious about Saint Qadeem for a variety of reasons, and the most thorough descriptions come when she gets a chance to "study" him a bit. I hope that after fixing him in the reader's mind in Part III and IV, only slight reminders are needed.

How much repetition is too much for you?

Subtle Things #4: Thank you, Captain Obvious

(That's the snark I hear when I hit the publish button on my blog.)

I like subtle. I like writers who can lay out all the subtle clues on the table and then string them together into an interesting plot climax. Stories that rely on witholding some vital clue until the last moment don't have the same punch. I saw a good example of this, recently, in the movie Wreck-it Ralph -- who expects subtlety from Disney, right? Non-Pixar Disney, that is. Maybe because I didn't go in expecting it, it was a pleasant surprise.

Drama? Where?

What constitutes subtle, though? There's a continuum from the most blindingly obvious things like:

“Your foolishness will make you weak, and then there will be a winnowing.”

down to things that are only meaningful in hindsight, if at all:

I reached for him again, meaning to check his kir, but Kiefan handed me the book instead. “I am well enough, for now.”

Do you throw out plot clues subtly? Or should a character point a finger and announce: "He's trying to distract her with a book! That means he's fibbing!" It's a question of genre style and personal style.

What draws the reader's attention to things and makes them obvious? In an early draft of Disciple, Part I, one of my betas pointed out to me that something needed more emphasis. Here is the original text:

“’Twas your father who opposed?” Lady Lorcana weighed that. “But did not prevent, else you would not be here.” 

“The piglet died,” I said, and then had to go on to explain. “Father brought me home from the Order after my two years of learning, even though Master Parselev wanted me for his apprentice...

What deserved emphasis was the piglet's death -- the title of Part I is "For Want of a Piglet" -- and here it's kinda buried in the dialogue. So I revised the dialogue to single it out:

“’Twas your father who opposed?” M’lady Lorcana weighed that. “But did not prevent, else you would not be here.”  

“The piglet died,” I said.  

“A piglet?” Leix chuckled when she said it. “How did a piglet sway your father?” 

“Father brought me home from the Order ... 

The emphasis is provided by repeating "piglet" and asking a question that the reader might reasonably be thinking at that moment.

Some things that I've noticed writers can use to draw the reader's attention to things without blatantly pointing and announcing "This is important!":

• Repetition, but don't do it too much.
• Using formal, foreboding, "prophetic" language, as in my example about winnowing. This is on the less subtle side, and the more formal and stuffy the language, the less subtle it is. But this sort of thing can fit in well with the style/voice/genre of the story, or the character, so... use with care.
• Lavish description above and beyond other story elements. Be careful not to break voice or bog down the action, though. 
• Physically setting it apart, if it's an object or a person, so that there's nothing else to focus on. If this is an action or an event, then it's a relatively uncluttered one -- no interruptions, no ancillary plotlines involved. 
• Drawing the character's attention to it, through movement or some important detail. This is different from the narrative drawing attention to things -- if your (convincingly real, sympathetic) character pays attention about something, hopefully the reader will too.  

What techniques do you use? What would you add to my list?

Subtle Things #3: Department of Redundancy Department

When is something redundant, and when is something repeated for emphasis?

Repeating things to remind the readers of facts is a different issue -- I just spun that off into a separate post. This is an extension of Subtle Things #2, using adverbs, because many adverbs are in fact redundant once you use a more specific verb.

In general, you don't want to over-use words too much. We've all had situations where a semi-common word just happens to crop up three times in two sentences, and it jars the eye. It starts to draw attention to itself.* The danger then is in hitting the thesaurus too hard in the search for synonyms to keep from repeating yourself too much. That's its own problem: using the wrong word because you were so paranoid of using the right word again.

How much is too much? When does the thesaurus steer you wrong? These are judgement calls. Subtle things.

Redundancy also strikes in giving the reader information inefficiently. It happens a lot with actions involving directions -- see #1 and #2 below. These are attempts to be clear about the action, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. But. IMO, it becomes a trust issue at a certain point. I'll explain more when I talk about the examples individually.

There's nothing grammatically wrong with the following sentences (all from Disciple.)

1. Frida reached up to take [the baby] down and kiss his cheek.
2. He slung [the severed head] and the envoy caught it in his belly, falling back onto his ass from the impact.
3. His sword fell from his skeletal hand and he screamed, his companions screamed, and none of them saw Sir Rostislav coming.
4. Anders touched the knot of kir it offered and knit it into shape, twisted it and pushed it into the sphere’s surface.

Well, okay, you can argue about my grammar but this post's about redundancy and repetition.

1. Why is this a "trust issue?" It's not obvious, out of context like this: the baby is being carried by a rider, and Frida is standing on the ground beside the horse. If she's going to reach for the baby, of course she's reaching up. If she's going to take the baby from the rider and kiss him, of course there will be downward movement involved. Therefore, up and down are redundant, and I'm trusting the reader to know that. Because my readers are smart, observant people. If this were, say, the first sentence of the scene and there was no context, I would leave it as it is.
2. Back, here is redundant for obvious reasons. If you're catching a high-velocity thing in the gut, it's going to be awful hard to fall any way but back. Don't insult your readers' intelligence. They are smart, observant people. 
3. Repetition for emphasis. Something horrible just happened, and I want the reactions to hit the reader for extra oomph. Plus, in my head the close repetition echoes that microsecond it takes to realize what just happened and react: the guy it happened to first, then those close by him. I'm thinking I'm going to also use this sentence in a post about long vs. short sentences. One sentence, or three? 
4. It is a very common word and it can put up with a lot of repetition. But this is a bit much, for my tastes. The third it is redundant. The first one refers to something in the previous sentence. This could stand some re-wording for clarity; I'll have to consider the whole passage for that. 

*There was an episode of Star Trek: TNG which drove me up the wall with this. It was a holodeck episode, casting Data as Sherlock Holmes, and the word footfalls was massively over-used. It got painful to watch, halfway through. Uncommon words need to be used sparingly so they keep their effectiveness.

How much is too much, for you?

Subtle things #2: Using adverbs correctly

Correctly? Never use adverbs!

In general, yes. Saying "never!" is certainly simpler than trying to explain all the situations where they could be used correctly, if the conditions are right. Plus, English is a great language with tons of specific words and it will let you make stuff up on the fly -- you can cut down on your adverbs just by taking advantage of that. So do that.

But. Adverbs can be used to convey information that doesn't easily go anyplace else. It's a judgement call on the writer's part, so it's difficult to argue about without being either very situation-specific or very macro-level non-specific (as in, "never!"). I'm going to be very situation-specific, to try to illustrate a pattern.

Some of my transgressions in the raw draft of Disciple, Part VI, with adverbs highlighted:

1. His one short, melancholy letter was tucked safely away at home.
2. The pavilion cleared quickly; even the steward and the pages left, once they’d cleared the trenchers.
3. At bow range, Arcea would surely return fire, and my widest shield… “I won’t be able to protect them all,” I had to admit.
4. The armsman in front skidded in surprise and nearly fell.
5. I could feel his pulse, faintly.

(Searching for "ly" in my manuscript points out two words I'm guilty of over-using: only, and nearly. That's a whole 'nother post, on quirky habits, though.)

1. This adverb is 95% redundant. Things that are tucked away can be reasonably assumed to be safe, IMO. Delete.
2. This one, I would keep. Pavilions can clear slowly, so quickly is carrying important information. Clear is not a terribly specific verb, but I'm summarizing a nonspecific group of actions. What might be more specific? Emptied, but it's also not very specific. Evacuated and deserted have the wrong connotations, and indicate that the pavilion did the action. I could go into more detail about people lingering to chat, or who left right away, but I need to get to the important stuff. Short sentence, adverb, extra detail to specify how empty the pavilion is, keep moving. 
3. Surely here is... 75% redundant, because the enemy will return fire. There's no question of it. This one is a voice issue, my gut says. I'll probably delete it, but it bears some thought. 
4. Why not almost fell? Voice. But does this adverb convey important information? Skidded indicates loss of control. It's close to falling already. I could be more specific, here -- did the armsman fall to one knee? Manage to keep his balance? Run into a wall and catch himself on that? I'll have to look at the surrounding sentences to make a final call on this. 
5. Faintly does bring important information about the patient's health, but what I have to reconsider here is whether the feeling is what's faint or the pulse. And, actually, it's the pulse that's faint. This should be an adjective, not an adverb: I could feel his faint pulse.

So out of five adverbs, I would keep one. Maybe two.

Given those five adverbs, you would probably do something different. That's the nature of these "subtle things" I've been ruminating on. (See Subtle Things #1, explanation's at the bottom.)

And looking at it now, I have to invoke another Subtle Thing: "Arcea would surely return fire." No, they won't, because they're using bows. Fire came mean shoot only after guns were invented and fire got involved in the process (cannons, matchlocks, flintlocks, etc.) Ha! I've been fighting to keep the language period-accurate, but one snuck through. That's a whole 'nother post to do... 

Subtle Things #1: Character innocence

I was watching The Cabin in the Woods -- I'm not much of a horror fan, but I am a Joss Whedon fan, so it had to be done. Joss's commentaries are always thought-provoking, too, which was part of why I wanted to see it. And one particular scene jumped out at me because 1. it's a reliable hallmark of good writing, 2. it's something I'm wrestling with in writing Disciple, Part VI and, 3. it's a subtle thing and I've been compiling a list of those lately.

The scene was an excellent example of character innocence.

1.

We're all going to die, aren't we...

What do I mean by "character innocence"? (It's just the term I came up with.) Joss's characters don't act according to knowledge they don't have. They're completely innocent of "authorial knowledge" -- those things the author knows about the story, which can leak into the characters' behavior in subtle ways. The scene that so nicely illustrates this is when one of the characters in Cabin is going to try to go for help. He takes a moment to say good-bye and sketch out some plans in case various, quite reasonable, things go wrong. None of which are what actually goes wrong, of course -- and that's the entire point.

The character doesn't know he's in a horror movie. As far as he knows, he's out in a cabin with his friends -- who he treats as friends, because he doesn't know they're going to die -- and weird, bad things are happening. He acts like the reasonable, stand-up guy that he is, in response to that.

The observant viewer of the movie knew what was going to happen. It creates either dread, for the observant, or a gut-punch for those who forgot about the set-up and got this nasty reminder.

"Well, of course the character wouldn't know he's about to die." Yes. But keeping characters in the dark can be easier said than done.

2.
Disciple is told from a first-person perspective. Mostly. Because of that "mostly," the readers know some things, going into Part VI, that my narrator does not. My narrator is trying to deduce what those things are, and it's difficult to write because I hate for her to be wrong -- and because I know the truth in great detail. I wrote it. It happened.

Why can't she just come to the right conclusions? Because -- like what happened to the guy in Cabin -- the truth is something she has no reason to expect. Letting her make that kind of intuitive leap, without sufficient clues, would ring false. It would take away her "innocence."

3.
Authorial knowledge creeps in very subtly. It can be very difficult to put your finger on. In a lot of situations -- genre movies in particular -- the audience is more than complicit. They expect it, to a degree. And yet the story is always better when the characters are completely innocent.

A lesser writer, to go back to Cabin, would've had the guy just announce "I'll go get help!" and head off to his doom. Because it doesn't matter what he says or thinks -- he's going to die. This is a horror movie and characters are expected to die. The fact that a character didn't say or think, in such a situation, is a form of admission that he knows it doesn't matter what he says or thinks.

But in Cabin, the characters gathered round for a moment to give meaning to this one character's departure. It validated that this was real and serious, to them, which is what real people would do.

No real person wants to be the redshirt. So no "real" character should act like one.

Subtle things
I've been collecting a list of "subtle things" as I've been thinking about that vast, foggy land between "serviceable writing" and "excellent writing." We've all heard the standard writing advice maxims: Show, don't tell. Characters need to be sympathetic. The story needs to progress toward a goal. Don't forget to add a backdrop for the action. Etc.

All of those are guaranteed to improve one's writing. But they won't win you a Hugo. At a certain level of writing skill, personal tastes, audience expectations and artistry come into play -- and it's no longer a matter of whether you did something right, it's whether you sold it to the reader. The elements of good writing that can be pinned down become -- subtle. Small. Argue-able. A sentence here, a few words there. Which, if taken out of context, may not look particularly good in and of themselves.

So you will see these posts pop up, as they come to me and as I find examples. What are some subtle hallmarks of good writing that you've noticed? I've got seven more on my list...