All Posts Tagged writing

Comma power

By Bill on Comments

This blog’s been provoked by a recent exchange with some of my fellow-Pfoxmoor authors on the subject of commas. I think I use too many. It’s probably because lots of my sentences are too long and, as part of the editing process, I read them aloud and recognise the need to put in some pauses. We all make choices in grammar and punctuation (consciously or otherwise), to suit the stress we want to put on something or alter the flow and rhythm of a piece. But I do respect the rules and when I break them it’s usually because I want to achieve a particular effect.

I used to be much more pernickety but I’ve mellowed. I can see that splitting infinitives sometimes makes sense, especially in dialogue or ‘reader-friendly’ passages, because the ‘correct’ alternative sounds stilted. By luck, I’ve an excellent example of how the process works in the hands of a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing with it. It’s from The Pheasant Plucker, a thriller written by a friend, Bill Daly. Unaccountably, it’s out of print at the moment but there are still some copies available through sellers on Amazon. Here’s the relevant bit:

“The beam from his discarded torch catches his knife and I can see drops of my blood glistening on the blade. He lobs the knife in the air and expertly grabs the spinning blade by the handle as it falls, then he lurches forward, knife arm fully extended. ‘If you don’t back off, Dumas – or whatever the hell your name is,’ he snarls, ‘I’m going to fucking kill you.’

It’s ridiculous, I know, but the split infinitive upsets me more than my split cheek. My brain takes time out to analyse where fucking should go in that phrase. Normally, the adverb would follow the infinitive, but ‘I’m going to kill fucking you’ doesn’t sound right and ‘I’m going to kill you fucking’ doesn’t bear thinking about. As I launch myself again at his throat, I fleetingly wonder whether I might be the first person ever to meet his maker while parsing.”

I wish I’d written that.

Rules and arguments about them are fun. I don’t want to see the anarchy of a laissez-faire attitude to language triumph, but I do want language to have its freedoms. When a singer praises ‘April in Paris’ and asks ‘Whom can I run to?’ it’s admirable that he/she has remembered that ‘whom’ is an indirect object qualified by the preposition ‘to’ and therefore needs the ‘m’ at the end. But if she/he also remembered that you mustn’t end a sentence with a preposition, the rhyme (with ‘what have you done to …’) would be completely buggered. (I also think that singing ‘To whom can I run?’ would detract significantly from his/her credibility as a passionate lover.)

Anyway, the wee debate I mentioned at the beginning concerned whether you put commas in when you write a sentence such as ‘The captain of the Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard, is bald’. (Incidentally, I don’t see the logic in the American convention of putting that final full stop INSIDE the inverted commas. It punctuates the whole sentence, not just the bit in quotes. Discuss.)

Well, these things are called nouns or phrases in apposition and, according to my equivalent of the Bible, a little book by Jan Venolia called Write Right, you can have restrictive or non-restrictive appositive phrases or nouns. The restrictive ones (such as the one beginning ‘a little book’ in the previous sentence) need commas; they either identify or add information to the thing to which they’re in apposition, so:

David Cameron, a Prime Minister in name only, never answers questions.
Or:
Bill Kirton, author of breathtakingly good crime novels, frequently pontificates about grammar.
Or:
Two of my writer friends, Ben and Jerry, are very careful with commas.

On the other hand, the non-restrictive ones don’t add anything to the meaning of the sentence and aren’t necessary for identification, as in:

My friend Vladimir couldn’t care less about grammar, spelling, editing or any of those time-wasting activities.
Or:
Crime-busting north-east cop Jack Carston is getting fed up with his so-called superiors. (NB NOT ‘fed up OF’)

So there. And let’s end with a little exercise to show that commas do matter. What’s the difference between the following two sentences?

My daughter who is a pilot enjoys classical music.
My daughter, who is a pilot, enjoys classical music..

The stripped down version and others

By Bill on Comments

I’ll keep this short. It’s just to provide my revised version of the exercise in the last posting. First, though, an apology for not making the ‘rules’ entirely clear (unforgivable in a piece about clarity in writing). It was purely a cutting exercise, not improving or paraphrasing or doing anything else to make it much more acceptable than the ugly thing it was. In other words, the idea was simply to get rid of any words or expressions that added nothing to the meaning without losing ANY of the information of the original.

So, with the deletions in bold …

The general consensus of opinion is that the complete elimination of greenhouse gas emissions is absolutely essential to the continued survival of our species. Martyn Gillespie, who is the chief protagonist of the carbon trading lobby, has proposed a temporary reprieve by adopting a policy which may possibly suggest that compromise is a(n) viable option. His group is small in size but, at this moment in time, it is gaining in credibility. His opponents would do well to recognize its potential for growth and adapt their future plans in order to give advance warning of the complete monopoly Gillespie is beginning to construct. Nothing short of total unanimity will do. Researchers who care about the environment around them must spell out in detail the disastrous consequences that could arise if Gillespie were to prevail.

In her comment, Sara offered a passage from Thomas Hardy to ‘have a go at’.  Not surprisingly, it’s hard. In fact, I think almost any deletions would spoil its rhythms and detract from the force of the argument. The best I could do would be to cut one adjective. Try it.

“He did sometimes think he had been ill-used by fortune, so far as to say that to be born is a palpable dilemma, and that instead of men aiming to advance in life with glory they should calculate how to retreat out of it without shame. But that he and his had been sarcastically and pitilessly handled in having such irons thrust into their souls he did not maintain long. It is usually so, except with the sternest of men. Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own; and, even while they sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon, invent excuses for the oppression which prompts their tears.” (The Return of the Native)

It’s the difference between literature and … well, less careful writing. But literature doesn’t have to be poncy. Here’s another bit of Hardy, from Jude the Obscure, one that stresses Jude’s feelings of unworthiness, and it’s very simply written.

“In the dusk of that evening Jude walked away from his old aunt’s as if to go home. But as soon as he reached the open down he struck out upon it till he came to a large round pond. The frost continued, though it was not particularly sharp, and the larger stars overhead came out slow and flickering. Jude put one foot on the edge of the ice, and then the other: it cracked under his weight; but this did not deter him. He ploughed his way inward to the centre, the ice making sharp noises as he went. When just about the middle he looked around him and gave a jump. The cracking repeated itself; but he did not go down. He jumped again, but the cracking had ceased. Jude went back to the edge and stepped upon the ground.

It was curious, he thought. What was he reserved for? He supposed he was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide.”

I have to confess I think it’s funny that poor old Jude doesn’t even think he’s important enough to commit suicide..

Prose you can see through

By Bill on 15 Replies

I’ve been proofreading the fifth of my books in Pearson’s ‘Brilliant’ series – it’s Brilliant Academic Writing. Those of you who’ve read earlier posts on the old blog site may remember me referring to another book for students which I co-wrote with Kathleen McMillan and the nonsense generator we’d created which produced pretty convincing examples of bad academic writing. It uses random numbers to generate gems such as:

‘Studies have shown conclusively that intuitively deconstructive morphologies lead inexorably to the paradox of indecipherable polymorphic structures.’

Of course, it means nothing. Well it may but if it does it’s a fluke. Our point was simply to destroy the myth that academic writing has to be incomprehensible, use sentences as long as paragraphs and words no-one except the writer has ever heard of. At its best, academic writing is clear and accessible.

But that’s what all writing should be, except that, with fiction, we’re allowed to leave gaps, make suggestions but allow readers to complete them. In an excellent article I read recently on the great Elmore Leonard, the writer (sorry, can’t remember who it was or where I read it) quoted the opening lines of his novel Tishomingo Blues. They are:

‘Dennic Lenehan the high diver would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down on it, that’s what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder … when he told this to girls who hung out at amusement parks they’d put a cute look of pain on their faces and say what he did was awesome. But wasn’t it like really dangerous?’

Leonard is renowned for the spareness of his writing, the elimination of anything that’s not necessary. This example is deceptively simple but look at how much information he gives the reader. The matter-of-factness of ‘would tell people’ (i.e. it happened all the time); the comprehensive description of all the aspects of his terrifying act in 2 lines and a simple image; the layers of information in ‘girls who hung out at amusement parks’; the deliberate impact of ‘they’d put’, ‘cute’ and ‘awesome’; and the sheer beauty of that final question, reinforcing the gap between the real danger and perceptions of it. All this and more.


Simple words and effects but great writing. And one of his recommendations in his 10 ‘rules’ is that you should cut, cut, cut. Get rid of the superfluous stuff, however wonderful or ‘literary’ you think it is. So, for those of you who like wee exercises (I know some of you do), how about this? It’s a passage I use sometimes in workshops. It’s definitely not literature or ‘good’ writing, but it’s the sort of thing that crops up pretty regularly in press reports. Your task, should you accept it, is to get rid of as much of it as you can but leave its main message(s) intact. At the moment, it’s 134 words long. What’s the lowest number you can get it down to?

‘The general consensus of opinion is that the complete elimination of greenhouse gas emissions is absolutely essential to the continued survival of our species. Martyn Gillespie, who is the chief protagonist of the carbon trading lobby, has proposed a temporary reprieve by adopting a policy which may possibly suggest that compromise is a viable option. His group is small in size but, at this moment in time, it is gaining in credibility. His opponents would do well to recognize its potential for growth and adapt their future plans in order to give advance warning of the complete monopoly Gillespie is beginning to construct. Nothing short of total unanimity will do. Researchers who care about the environment around them must spell out in detail the disastrous consequences that could arise if Gillespie were to prevail.’

There are several tautologies, some obvious, some less so. You can leave your version as a comment if you like, or just give your final word count. The important point, which I’m adding belatedly (sorry Diane) is that you’re only allowed to delete words, not rewrite bits or change the order. This is strictly a cutting exercise.

(P.S. I have no idea why the only avatar that appears in the comments is mine. I’m working on correcting that but if anybody has any suggestions, I’d welcome them.)

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