Tag: peeves

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s peeve, for those of you who are collecting the whole set (also for those of you who aren’t; I’m not particular) is orbs.

Not the literal ones that are carrying out material functions, such as being part of some monarch’s regalia, and not the non-material ones that are nevertheless actual visual artifacts that can occur in flash photography.

No, I’m rendered peevish by the sort of romantic over-writing in which characters never have blue or green or hazel eyes – instead, they’re graced with sapphire or emerald or topaz orbs.    Pity the poor character with brown eyes, who has to deal with chocolate orbs instead.

(It is probably fortunate, both for the characters and for the reader, that this particular school of over-writing tends to bestow evocatively-colored orbs only upon the sympathetic characters.)

Peeve of the Day

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Because it’s hot and humid this evening – great weather for feeling peevish.

Today’s peeve, writers and gentlethings, is that pair of not-quite homonyms, flout and flaunt.  Not only do they sound sort of alike, the definitional territories they occupy are close enough together that it’s no wonder they’re often confused.  (That’s not going to spare you my peevishness, though.  Nobody promised you this writing thing was going to be easy.)

To flout something is to recklessly disregard something, or to openly disobey or act against it:  Maisie chose to flout convention and run off to Paris with Duke Roderick in his private zeppelin.

To flaunt something is to display it in an ostentatious or deliberately provocative manner:  The gossip-mongers were quite put out when Maisie returned two weeks later flaunting an engagement ring with a diamond the size of a cut-glass doorknob.

Got the difference now?

Good.

Today’s Peeve…

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…is a spelling peeve:  the confusing duo of capital and capitol.

Capitol is the building: The state capitol is an imposing granite structure with a golden dome.

Capital is the city that’s the seat of government for a country or state or similar region.  The paperwork needs to be sent to the state capital.

Capital is also the spelling for just about every use of the word that doesn’t refer to the big building with the fancy dome.  Usually, these words have something to do with being at the top or the head of something:  capital ships are the most important ones in the fleet; capital funds and assets are the ones you start with; capital crimes are the ones that you could lose your head over; and so forth.

As for the fact that the state capitol is usually in the state capital . . . these things are sent to test us, and to remind us that while the spellchecker may be our good friend, it’s not necessarily our most reliable friend.

Peeve of the Day

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(What can I say?  Storm-and-pollen weather makes me peevish.)

Today’s peeve is another entry in the Homonyms to Watch  Out For competition:  alter and altar.  Not the same thing, folks.  To start with, one of them’s a verb and the other’s a noun.  Beyond that—

To alter something is to change it.  The adherents of the Arachnophagic Heresy of the Cult of the Great Spider angered the orthodox Spiderians when they attempted to alter the liturgy.

An altar  is a table or flat-topped block used as the focus for a religious ritual.  The orthodox Spiderians disapproved of the Arachnophagists’ practice of setting up the main altar as a dinner table, with the centerpiece being a platter of deep-fried tarantulas.

It all ended badly, of course.  The attempt to alter the Spiderian altar resulted in the terrible and bloody Spider Wars of the Fifth Age, at the end of which the Cult of the Great Spider was no more.

Weather, Incoming

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Or perhaps not.

Today’s promised thunderstorms failed to materialize, leaving us with only high humidity, a falling barometer, and that waiting-for-the-shoe-to-drop feeling.

The resulting general disgruntlement reminded me of one of the classic errors of fiction writing, one almost guaranteed to induce a similar disgruntlement in the reader:  the failure to deliver on a promised thunderstorm.

This is how it goes (or doesn’t go.)  You have the reader, trustingly reading along.  You have your foreshadowings of trouble to come, draped all over the plot in a shadowy manner.  You have Chekov’s Gun, displayed in a place of honor above the mantelpiece.  You have your dramatic tension, wound up tight.  And then—

Nothing happens.  The foreshadowed conflicts fail to materialize – or worse, they are sidestepped or handwaved away.  Chekov’s Gun remains untouched by human (or inhuman) hands, and its presence in the story turns out to be merely ornamental after all.  And all that carefully-built dramatic tension fizzles out like a damp firecracker.

At that point, you’re left with a severely disgruntled reader, one who was promised thunderstorms and didn’t get them.

Peeve of the Day

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“Waive” and “wave”, people.

To waive something is to refrain from using or insisting on it.  A speaker can choose to waive his or her customary fee for a good cause; a school may choose to waive a particular entrance requirement for an otherwise promising applicant.

To wave something, on the other hand, is to float, shake, or move it back and forth.  The homecoming queen on the parade float will wave her hand at the crowd; the kids at the Fourth of July picnic will wave sparklers in the air.  (Or at least, they used to wave them.  For all I know, juvenile sparkler-waving is verboten these days in the name of safety.)

Not the same word.  And the spell-checker won’t help you – you’ll have to check for this one with your own two eyes.

Oh, for Heaven’s Sake

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(Or, Dr. Doyle is peeved, again, and thinks some unkind thoughts.)

How to be self-pitying and self-aggrandizing, both at once. If the literary novel is a moribund art form, maybe it’s because this is the sort of person who writes them.

Of course, my opinion isn’t worth bothering with, because I read and write genre fiction — the sort of stuff the writer characterizes as “the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy” — as opposed to serious, difficult fiction.

(Right. I spent seven years studying literature written in languages nobody even speaks any more because I’m scared of difficulty. Pull the other one; it’s got bells on.)

Peeve of the Day

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That’s right, people . . . it’s one of those days when Dr. Doyle waxes, if not wroth, at least a little bit cranky about the latest writing-related pebble in her metaphorical sandal.

Okay, then.  Listen up.

The phrase is not “free reign.”  It’s “free rein.”

Why?  Because it’s a horsemanship metaphor.  In equestrian usage, “free rein” refers to a rein held loosely to allow a horse free motion, or to the freedom that doing so gives to the horse.

(It refers, in other words, not to having control or power over somebody or something, but to having self-determination or freedom of choice in a particular situation.)

Stringing Ideas Together

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Or, actually, not.

When you’re building up a sequence of ideas (which generally results in a paragraph, and a whole bunch of paragraphs together generally results in a completed story, or an essay, or a letter thanking your Great-Aunt Euphemia for the half-dozen silver fish forks in a pattern that isn’t yours), you don’t want to just string the ideas together as they occur to you.  You’re constructing something that has to stand up when you’re done with it, not just lie there on the carpet like a string of Christmas lights after the tree has come down.

This means that you need to think about the relationship of your ideas to each other, and put them together in ways that indicate those relationships – while at the same time making sentences that have good sound and good rhythm and good grammar.

Take a simple example.   Here’s a little paragraph where the sentences are all (mostly) grammatical, but it’s still a bad paragraph:

As she hit the ball, Jill ran for first base.  Running for first base, her foot turned under her, spraining her ankle and putting her on the bench for the rest of the season.

This is, as I said, (mostly) grammatical, in that a native speaker of English can read it and understand what’s going on at the softball game.  But it isn’t good.  It’s clunky, the ideas are in the wrong order, and there’s a dangling participle lurking in there as well.

(Also, entirely too many present participles, period.  Writers get told at some point in high school or thereabouts that they need to vary their sentence structures, and for some reason, the method that a lot of them latch on to is the introductory participial phrase.  People, I’m here to tell you – too many sentences starting with participial phrases is just as monotonous as a bunch of simple subject-verb-direct object sentences lined up in a row.)

But I digress.  Let’s fix that little paragraph, a bit at a time.

Sentence one:  As she hit the ball, Jill ran for first base.  This is bad because one, it takes two ideas of roughly the same weight and makes one of them subordinate to the other; and two, it puts the actions into the wrong order.  First Jill hits the ball; then she runs for first base.  So we can fix this sentence by changing it to:  Jill hit the ball and ran for first base.

Sentence two:  Running for first base, her foot turned under her, spraining her ankle and putting her on the bench for the rest of the season.  This sentence is also bad for a couple of reasons and not just one.  The biggie, of course, is the dangling participle right at the beginning:  Running for first base, her foot turned under her.  This is wrong because it isn’t the foot that’s running for first base, it’s Jill.  The first thing we do to fix this sentence, then, is to break that part off from the rest of the sentence and rewrite it:  While she was running, her foot turned under her.  (We also ditch the repetition of for first base, because the reader’s seen that already and we don’t need to have another iteration of it cluttering up the page.)

This leave us with spraining her ankle and putting her on the bench for the rest of the season.  There are a couple of different ways to fix this part, depending upon whether you think that the sprained ankle or the benching for the season is the more important idea, or whether you want to give the two ideas approximately equal weight.

You could throw the emphasis onto the sprained ankle:  She sprained her ankle, which put her on the bench for the rest of the season.

You could emphasize the fact that Jill has been put out of action:  Because she sprained her ankle, she was put on the bench for the rest of the season.

Or you could get fancy and use a semicolon to hook up two equivalent clauses, giving them both equal weight and letting the reader determine their relationship:  She sprained her ankle; the injury put her on the bench for the rest of the season.

I like that last one – but then, I generally like semicolons.  Let’s use it anyway, for maximum sentence variety.  That gives us a new, finished paragraph:

Jill hit the ball and ran for  first base.  While she was running, her foot turned under her.  She sprained her ankle; the injury put her on the bench for the rest of the season.

This still isn’t one of the world’s blue-ribbon paragraphs – but it’s better than the one we started with.

And the voice from the back of the lecture hall asks, “Do I have to think like that about all my paragraphs?”

Sadly, yes.  But not until the second or third draft.  Finish the story first, then work on making the sentences better.  Because pretty sentences will get you nowhere if you haven’t got a story for them to tell.

As I Write This…

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…I am moved to peevish comment.

People, don’t use “as” to string clauses together when you’re narrating action.  Save “as” for linking together actions which are simultaneous or nearly so, and are directly related – “He leaped aboard the train as it pulled away from the platform’’ or “As he wandered about the room, he absent-mindedly rearranged all the knick-knacks and framed photographs.”  That sort of thing.

Don’t use it for joining clauses which would be more appropriately connected with “and” or “then.”

And remember, also, that “as” is a subordinating conjunction.  If you use it to join a clause to the main body of your sentence, the grammatical setup implies that the action of that clause is less important than the action of the main verb.  Don’t do something like that unless you really mean it.  (Which is a pretty good all-purpose piece of writing advice, in case you ever wanted one.)

In general, important actions deserve to star in their own independent clauses, rather than being supporting players in somebody else’s sentence.