Life, Writing, Weirdness

Which really should be “Things that Bug Me in Writing”, because I read more than just fiction, but it is mostly fiction I’m thinking about when I do one of these posts.

I could also label this one as Part 4 if I decided to count my small rant a couple of weeks ago about the Oxford Comma needing to be standard. We’ll keep things clean, though, and I’ll just tack that in with the other things I’m going to mention this time out.

Reminder: everything I put in a post like this is an opinion. Note the title, “Things that Bug Me in Fiction”. Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy. Just because something bothers me doesn’t mean it will bother someone else.

If Part 1 was about keeping your timeline consistent and Part 2 was about annoying dialogue habits that some authors have, Part 3 is about grammar, mostly about some very specific things that seem to run rampant even in high end, professionally published work that’s passed through more than one set of editorial hands.

First, a general note on grammar. A lot of writers need to understand it before they just disregard it. I think it’s important to know when breaking a rule accomplishes something other than betraying that I don’t know what the rule is. That means that if I’m going to do something grammatically incorrect, it should either be inside dialogue or inside a character’s head, not in the prose itself. If I’m telling you what’s happening, that’s objective and I should follow standard grammar as closely as I can, perhaps adjusting for the country I expect to sell in, although I’m more likely to do that in a minor editing pass before I submit it to a market in another country. I’m Canadian, so my own writing happens in Canadian grammar. The differences between US, UK, Australian, New Zealand, and most other flavours of English are mostly (although not completely) spelling variants, so that’s fairly easy.

This grammar note goes far beyond the usual your/you’re and there/their/they’re arguments you see online or the ones about the value of punctuation. Things like not telling me about the rubber, blue, big ball. Those adjectives are in the wrong order and will make the sentence uncomfortable to anyone who’s essentially fluent in the language. Know when you should say Baljeet and me vs Baljeet and I. The hint there is to figure out whether it would be I or me if Baljeet wasn’t involved then pick that one and add Baljeet back in.

A few specifics:

1. The Oxford Comma, which I already complained about the lack of, and it can be argued that this is a stylistic point. It shouldn’t be, but apparently it is.
2. Commas have specific uses, but some writers seem to just sprinkle them across the page so that there’s some punctuation going on. Or skip them entirely.
3. Apostrophe Abuse. Ah, here comes an ‘s’, I’d better lube up an apostrophe to slide in before it gets here. Apostrophes also have specific uses in English, primarily to indicate either possession or a contraction of some kind.
4. Double Negatives. Just don’t. Except maybe in dialogue for a specific character.
5. Just because words have similar meanings doesn’t mean they have the same meaning. If they did, we wouldn’t have two words. Okay, we might, 100% synonyms are a real thing, but there are usually shades of meaning when switching between two synonyms, like shiny and polished. You can be either one of those without being the other, but you can also be both. And sometimes there’s more than just a shade of meaning, like less and fewer. There’s less slime in the pond but there are fewer frogs.
6. Make sure you’ve got the right homonym. Again, going beyond there/their/they’re, insert a very long treaty on this subject that includes the fact that every time I see “could of” instead of “could’ve” or “should of” instead of “would’ve”, I get a tiny step closer to an aneurysm.
7. Words have meanings. And here I’ll pick one that’s misused almost every time it’s used: decimate. Most writers seem to use it in the sense of some group of people or things being almost completely wiped out. It actually means to reduce something by ten percent, but common usage is pushing the word in the direction of just meaning a drastic reduction instead so that you can probably look it up in a dictionary and the original meaning has drifted down the list. Languages change and shift. I may get over this particular one eventually, but it continues to annoy me because words have meanings. Affect and effect are not the same. Neither do adverse and averse, moot and mute, advise and advice.
8. And because words have meanings, slang should only occur in dialogue or a character’s thoughts. This comes under the same heading as accents, which I think I mentioned in Part 2.

That’s probably lots for now (and I can probably do several more of these) but remember the initial caveat above: characters can talk or think however they need to so that we learn something about them. And it can be fun when you subvert the expectations a reader gains from the way you have a character talk.

It’s also worth noting that a bunch of the grammar “rules” that many of us of a certain age or older were taught as children persist. Things like:

• I before E except after C, or when sounding like A as in neighbour or weigh. Or when your when your foreign neighbor Keith receives eight counterfeit beige sleighs from weird and feisty caffeinated weightlifters. There are far more words this one doesn’t apply to.
• It’s entirely okay to regularly split infinitives. Do it whenever you want to. Although if it’s as awkward as that one, everyone will notice.
• A preposition is fine to end a sentence with.

And so on. Ultimately, if I have two choices for the way something can be written to say the exact same thing, I try to always go for the more interesting option if I can. Conveying the meaning I want is the most important thing, but it just barely edges out keeping the reader reading.

One other general thing: do not trust the grammar checker in whatever word processing software you use. At this point, it’s almost certainly AI (as in LLM) driven which means it only knows what it’s been fed and if it’s being fed from the internet, it’s being fed an awful lot of things that are wrong (never mind that with the amount of LLM-generated writing on the internet now, some LLMs are starting to feed on themselves, so things will get worse). I’ve mostly used MS Word for writing for a long time, and its grammar checker is wrong a lot at this point. Oh, it’ll catch an “it’s” where it should be “its”, but solidly half the comma placements it wants to change are flat out wrong, and there’s an iceberg waiting to sink every story if you let it have its way. I regularly turn it off.

Clocking in at well over a thousand words, that’s more than enough grammatical complaining for this round.

Be well, everyone.