Danger signs to search for in your writing
io9.com
io9.com
* The passive voice is to be avoided.
* You want to not split your infinitives with a negative.
* In order to streamline your text, take out superfluous filler like "in order to".
* A preposition is something you should not end a sentence with.
* Never use stupidistic adjective forms.
* All generalizations are bad.
Reminds me of a joke:
A southern belle is on spring break with her friends when a couple of preppy types settle in next to her on the beach. She tries to be friendly to the nearest girl and says "where are y'all from?"
The snooty girl says "I'm from somewhere where they teach you not to end sentences with a preposition."
Without missing a beat, the southern girl says "where are y'all from, bitch?"
The revision shown in the article to "A Bad Uncle lifted Captain Samson over his head and hurled her over the edge of the catwalk," is an example of this problem. The reader knows how you throw someone, they don't need an explanation.
"The Bad Uncle hurled Captain Samson over the edge." (Presumably the reader knows they are on a catwalk, too, so "the catwalk" is unnecessary.)
If it is really important to convey that the Bad Uncle is very strong you could do "The Bad Uncle hurled Captain Samson over his head, off the catwalk," or something similar.
Edit: Also, the article discourages adverbs, but doesn't mention that adjectives are similarly bad. Most adjectives can be better conveyed through an action or specific detail. Don't say "she was nice", but do show her helping a lost child.
"Short words are the best and old words when short are best of all," as Winston Churchill would have it.
I always thought it would be a fun project to use an etymology database to make a Latinate-to-Germanic thesaurus, something you could use just like spell check on a document to suggest Germanic alternatives to Latinate words.
struck me funny that more than half of these words are 6+
National Novel Writing Month (http://nanowrimo.org) is a great way for people to get started, as are local writers' circles. Writing circles are generally very accepting of new people/outsiders, because everyone is on the look out for new perspectives.
I can't recommend this strongly enough. When November comes along, if you have any interest in writing, you should participate in NaNoWriMo if at all possible.
If humans were not so smart, wouldn't evolution prune away languages that are too messy?
It's interesting how English especially has evolved to consistently reduce complexity. We've lost gender, all noun inflection, some verb tenses, etc., which are exactly the tools that keep a language well-ordered and unambiguous. We've reduced clear structure and precision, but increased in flexibility.
Of course, making sense out of ambiguous, constantly-changing, and often contradictory things is the goal of most intellectual pursuits, and as we augment our intelligence with tools like Google, we need less and less to put things precisely into a priori categories or define complex systems of rules in general.
The "search and replace" tips given in the article would fail in most languages. From the top of my head I can think of 4 different ways to say "There was" in Portuguese, and I bet there are many more.
Not that it's good or bad. It's just a characteristic.
Strongly disagree. I think it's one of the most baroque, with too many special cases, irregulars, and gotchas. It doesn't have specific types of complexity. For example, its morphology[1] seems pretty bare, at least if you compare it to other Indo-European languages, but even there it's more complex than Japanese or native Hawaiian. To your point, that makes it mostly amenable to search-and-replace filters, which is convenient.
[1] Changes to the word reflecting grammatical usage, such as "-ness" signifying a noun or "-ed" signifying a past tense. These are usually the bits of other languages that English-speakers think are "hard."
I will use these tips to improve my comments.
Absolutely false. The use of "it" without an antecedent is called "expletive," and is perfectly valid. I agree that it's often bland, but there's no need to go around asking yourself "What does 'it' refer to here?"
Mr. C. LEONARD: Well, Elmore, you gave me advice. I told you that I was writing a novel and you said, good. Don't use any other words but "said" for dialogue and leave out the parts that people tend to skip. I think those were the two things you said.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. C. LEONARD: And they're both good, I have to tell you.
Mr. E. LEONARD: They're true today, yes.
I find mind maps really help me enormously in getting that right structure. My first draft or two is purely at the Mind Map level. It's amazing how letting my thoughts simmer away suggests some new angle or aspect of the subject. I find FreeMind very user-friendly and I endorse it wholeheartedly. I have no connection with the creator(s). I'm just a very satisfied customer.
Just yesterday I was playing around with FreeMind and it seems promising -- I think my next post is going to evolve from a mind map.