Lamenting Readers and Adverbial Writers: Read this Quickly
Created | Updated Sep 27, 2010
In the beginning, our editor was piqued.
Not at you folks. You're wonderful, all of you, and last week's edition of The h2g2 Post boasted a bumper crop of noteworthy stuff – news, opinion, humour, more opinion, travel, even more opinion – you get the idea. But sooner or later, the editor gets testy about stuff like, well, style. She's entitled, as she sometimes points out, because who gets stuck hunting for lost GuideML carets in the dead of night, with a headache, while everybody else is either sleeping the sleep of the unjust or watching the definitive zombie movie? The editor, of course.
Fuelled by one more misplaced modifier and the sight of 20,000 online blogs written in txtspk, Bel went ballistic on us. Okay, that is a gross exaggeration. Bel's version of going ballistic is to write a moderate, well-worded talking-points essay, and post it in the Alternative Writing Workshop – where it met with what passes for violent excitement over there. (The AWW is the h2g2 equivalent of what Americans think Royal Ascot is like.) With wild abandon, the writers over in that venue paused from their appointed tasks (saving the world, writing the great South African novel, advising the Queen on dog training) to animadvert upon the subject of what makes good writing good.
It's only Thursday, and we're up to a whole 30 posts. In the AWW, that's a flood.
Anyway, we thought we'd let the rest of you in on the fun – after all, you're all writers. Maybe you'll have something to add.
Here is an excerpt of Bel's original comments:
Assume I wrote about my last visit to London. It would read like this. Arrived at airport at 12.20. took underground to hotel. Checked in. Unpack, tea, shower. Off to embankment to meet friend. More tea. On to monument. Climbed up, splendid view. Got document on descending. Staircase wasn't a problem. Had pizza. Wasn't good. Wine was nice. Back to hotel. Sleep. Up early next morning. Breakfast was good. Met all my h2g2 friends. Did guided walk through town. On to pub. More friends there. Had lots of beer. Back to hotel, short night. Up at 8.00, then shower and breakfast. Back to airport. Arrived home at 3.00.
Did you grind your teeth while reading that? Or would you like to know more? Would you be intrigued to find out what else I did in London? Certainly not. I know I wouldn't...
As Bel pointed out, she is a writer because she is a reader. If she writes for us, she wants us to have the pleasure of reading. Something about that kind of travel description irked her, and she wanted to know what we thought about it. Being, well, writers, we were not slack with our opinionating.
PedanticBarSteward said:
[I]t explains (to me) the reason why I prefer to write to people rather than join 'chat' threads. But you are write and we are producing a generation of children incapable of writing anything longer than a 'text message' – ICUR2late."1
Then he advised us all to read Hemingway. Since opinions on Hemingway fall into two camps, we then agreed to disagree. In order not to derail the train of thought, I refrained from putting in my oar here. I expect my reward in heaven.
Pheroneous II had this to say about style:
Sometimes a choppy style can be used to wake the reader up, sometimes it can be used to reflect an impatience, or, at other times, to append an afterthought. Simply. I think of words, style and punctuation as tools to paint a picture. You may be painting a Da Vinci or a Pollock. Different strokes for different folks. All that. A prediliction for the constraint of rules may not or may not be a bad thing, but I vote for freedom. Always." The group was for freedom, and more word-play, please, like the above.
Although I refrained from mocking the white-bearded fellow with the penchant for chasing bulls, I did not entirely abandon parody, as in this post:
What is more annoying than the short, choppy sentences - I have no problem with brevity as the soul of wit - is the tendency to dwell on unimportant detail. Such as:
'On our most recent holiday, we climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.
The hotel was really second-rate. Why don't they ever leave enough towels? And the food was terrible. The chef refused my request for a hamburger on the shabby excuse that they only serve Tanzanian cuisine. Well, really.
The trip up Mount Uhuru was faster than I thought, marred only by Ronald's breaking a shoelace. (Note to self: Pack extras next year when we do Everest.) The guides were not very helpful, as we couldn't understand their English - and the Swahili program on my iPad wouldn't work. Who knew that there was no wi-fi above 3000 feet?
We bravely shrugged off our annoyance, and in spite of similar problems with our digital camera, we managed to get a really good picture at the summit, using an old film camera one of the guides brought along. Film, how quaint."
Attached, of course, is a photo of Ms Smileyface Mountainclimber and hubby in anoraks and bobble hats, posed in front of a rockface that could possibly be located somewhere near Swansea.
Now, that is mean, but I did worse: in another post, I located an example of exactly what I was parodying. And it took me less than a minute of web-searching. Elektra more helpfully sent us a link to Joe Camp's horse blog, which is a classic example of how to write an engaging blog, but distracted us all off into a whinge session about complicated web pages, bad font sizes, old eyes, young ideas, and the rest of it. Like all good writing groups, we stick to the subject about as well as my dog Ariel sticks to the path when his nose scents canine email in the bushes.
Then the discussion turned to adverbs, correct placement of, and MVP took the prize for bon-niest mot with the great line:
And why does the language have adverbs if they're no use?
People who write style-sheets, take note. MVP also defended the lowly (and often dissed) simile, to which the image in the previous paragraph is a belated homage. I replied with a boring litany of adverb mistakes, Bel generously pretended I was being educational rather than tedious, and that's as far as we've got up to press deadline. If we manage to keep it going, you can read, kibitz, lurk, or comment onsite.
In writing up this discussion (note correct use of phrasal verb, gah! Once an ESL instructor, always an ESL instructor, they don't let you out, they have to shoot you), I felt like (note simile here) the unknown 7/11 worker2 who put up the following message on the changeable sign outside:
My boss said to change the sign, so I did.
Bel said, "Do you think we could make something out of this discussion?" Yep, I said. And this is the piece what I wrote.
But it occurs to me – never start a sentence with "but", you get marks off – that we've said a great deal here.
h2g2 writers are passionate. They are informed. They are, well, yes, okay, opinionated, but they are good readers and listeners as well. They care about what we read, and how we write it.
I'm proud to know these people, I'm proud of the level of our discourse, and I am ever so grateful that people don't brain me when I say stuff like this.
Virtual tomatoes do not count. Fling away.
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