# Horrible Writing In Otherwise Good, or Tolerable, Books **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [September 16, 2008, 1:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772 "2008-09-16T01:13:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![MarcusF](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/67e7ee/32.png) [@MarcusF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MarcusF)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2008, 11:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/41 "2008-09-17T11:57:30Z")
> [@Anaamika](#): > > After that I read _Tai-Pan_. Might have been a good book…except tons and tons of the dialogue was written in dialect. A lot of pigdin. Which means one of the most important conversations in the book - the discussion between the Tai-Pan and Jin-Qua (I think that was the one) _was entirely in pigdin_. I never was so angry, so offended, and so irritated at a book. I don’t like dialectizing to start with, and this was almost unreadable. Hang on, I have a few clips in my LJ: I’m not sure why you were so angry, offended, and irritated by the dialogue in pidgin. Did you not understand it? It seemed easy enough to translate to me. A while since I read it but I my memory was it made an important point about the problems of mutual comprehension between the Tai Pan and Jin Qua. We know both characters are intelligent with subtle and complex thoughts but they are reduced to using the simplified and childlike pidgin English to communicate one to one. Part of the fun of Clavell’s books is the way they force you to accept a different world and different world views. One of the means he has to do this is by the use of different languge for different characters. Anyway, I don’t see this as an example of “Horrible Writing” - just a style you don’t like. ---
**Author:** ![jali](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ecae2f/32.png) [@jali](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jali)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2008, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/42 "2008-09-17T13:12:22Z")
Science Fiction. (by Julien May) Character escapes death on outlaw planet. Character goes home and eats… … a SNICKERDOODLE.:mad: It pissed me off so much - an effing snickerdoodle cookie. I tossed the book. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2008, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/43 "2008-09-17T13:27:24Z")
> [@](#): > > Another example of Niffleheim Syndrome is Stephen King (who I do think is a good author, though I thought he used to be better in the old days than he is now). In “Lisey’s Story,” which was a perfectly serviceable if somewhat dull book, the main character didn’t say “fucking”. She said “smucking.” Constantly. By the time I finished the book, I was ready to chuck it at a wall every time I saw that damned word. With a Word like Smucking, it _has_ to be Good! ---
**Author:** ![Anaamika](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Anaamika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anaamika)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2008, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/44 "2008-09-17T13:51:40Z")
> [@MarcusF](#): > > I’m not sure why you were so angry, offended, and irritated by the dialogue in pidgin. Did you not understand it? It seemed easy enough to translate to me. A while since I read it but I my memory was it made an important point about the problems of mutual comprehension between the Tai Pan and Jin Qua. We know both characters are intelligent with subtle and complex thoughts but they are reduced to using the simplified and childlike pidgin English to communicate one to one. Part of the fun of Clavell’s books is the way they force you to accept a different world and different world views. One of the means he has to do this is by the use of different languge for different characters. > > Anyway, I don’t see this as an example of “Horrible Writing” - just a style you don’t like. I had a long, snarky post written out, but I deleted it all. Let’s just say I disagree on all your counts and no, I did not find it easy to understand. ---
**Author:** ![First\_Amongst\_Daves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/4491bb/32.png) [@First\_Amongst\_Daves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/First_Amongst_Daves)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2008, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/45 "2008-09-17T14:31:14Z")
If the writer chooses that style and it makes the book less enjoyable, then that is horrible writing. “Snickerdoodle”, eh? Good grief. ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2008, 2:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/46 "2008-09-18T14:46:24Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > With a Word like Smucking, it _has_ to be Good! I thought that’s how Smurfs reproduced. ---
**Author:** ![Bosstone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/22d042/32.png) [@Bosstone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosstone)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2008, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/47 "2008-09-18T15:29:41Z")
> [@First\_Amongst\_Daves](#): > > I’m going to upset fans and Scots together by saying this, but Trainspotting was utterly impenetrable to me. Written in a contemporary Scottish burr (or is it brogue? I always get those two mixed up), I couldn’t get more than 20 pages into it. Disappointing as I enjoyed the movie. Scottish burr, Irish brogue. There’s an amusing radio play with Leonard Nimoy as Spock talking about Scotty getting drunk and singing in “that impenetrable burr.” So you’re not alone. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Unauthorized\_Cinnamon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/bc8723/32.png) [@Unauthorized\_Cinnamon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Unauthorized_Cinnamon)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2008, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/48 "2008-09-18T17:12:31Z")
Now, let me say that I love Jane Austen. Please, Janeites, don’t lynch me. I also realize this problem is most likely due to prevailing style when she was writing, rather than some personal defect. But her sentence structure is downright Byzantine. If you wrote like that in a college assignment, you’d get marked down for being impenetrable. Case in point - the first sentence of Chapter XXIII of _Northanger Abbey_. > [@](#): > > An hour passed away before the General came in, spent, on the part of his young guest, in no very favourable consideration of his character. This sentence is so confusing, it defeated Alfred MacAdam, the editor of my copy. After “spent,” he puts a footnote: “Tired. The sentence is confusing: Catherine regards General Tilney’s fatigue with suspicion.” Well, Al you’re half right. It seems pretty clear to me (though it did take several careful readings), that it means the General was gone for an hour, and that hour was \*spent \*by Catherine thinking uncharitable thoughts about him. But if a professional editor can be confused by her sentence structure, God help high school juniors trying to figure her out. (Though I must add, figuring her out and getting used to her style is so very, very worth the effort. She is so wicked, I adore her.) ---
**Author:** ![AuntiePam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2008, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/49 "2008-09-18T17:32:02Z")
Heh. You think **that’s** bad. Check out the first paragraph of _Wuthering Heights_: “1801. - I have just returned from a visit to my landlord - the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name.” All those unnecessary commas in the last sentence make it sound like the narrator is out of breath. I’d like to read the book, but the punctuation puts me off. (She gets really crazy with colons.) I’ve read many other books written in the same time period and had no problems with the punctuation. ---
**Author:** ![Tenebras](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/977dab/32.png) [@Tenebras](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tenebras)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2008, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/50 "2008-09-19T02:30:07Z")
I see your Wuthering Heights and raise you a Tristram Shandy: I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;–that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;–and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost.;–Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,–I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me. In addition to a shocking excess of semi-colons, there are also the extraneous dashes. ---
**Author:** ![Telperien](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/65b543/32.png) [@Telperien](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telperien)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2008, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/51 "2008-09-19T02:31:38Z")
> [@AuntiePam](#): > > Heh. You think **that’s** bad. Check out the first paragraph of _Wuthering Heights_: > > “1801. - I have just returned from a visit to my landlord - the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name.” > > All those unnecessary commas in the last sentence make it sound like the narrator is out of breath. > > I’d like to read the book, but the punctuation puts me off. (She gets really crazy with colons.) I’ve read many other books written in the same time period and had no problems with the punctuation. The book isn’t worth it. It’s like a template for soap operas. ---
**Author:** ![AuntiePam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2008, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/52 "2008-09-19T02:43:54Z")
I wonder if, a hundred years from now, readers, who encounter writers like Cormac McCarthy (and others), who not only eschew punctuation: but who often --despite the cries of their editors-- write in mere fragments of sentences, will have the same complaints as we, about writers of the past century. Nah. [strikes Tristram Shandy off the To Be Read list] ---
**Author:** ![Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hilarity_n.suze/32/6223_2.png) [@Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hilarity_N.Suze)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2008, 2:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/53 "2008-09-19T02:58:25Z")
Some of you people have to be whooshing, right? Tristram Shandy? Wuthering Heights? Have you never read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Talk about impenetrable. It’s practically a different language. Or how about The Faery Queen? ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2008, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/54 "2008-09-19T13:36:56Z")
When you first read “Gone With The Wind,” how much of the phonetic writng representing the slaves talking did you skip. These people had been born in the South, raised around cultured rich white Southerns and sounded like that? ---
**Author:** ![Unauthorized\_Cinnamon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/bc8723/32.png) [@Unauthorized\_Cinnamon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Unauthorized_Cinnamon)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2008, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/55 "2008-09-19T14:15:25Z")
That \*Wuthering Heights \*quote is pretty bad. Scarily, I totally understood the Tristram Shandy passage. I have been reading Austen and Thackeray lately, who are not too far removed in time from Sterne, so that could explain it. As for weird punctuation, I think that is also an artifact of the period. When I quoted Austen, I couldn’t decide quite where the sentence ended, because there’s a period immediately followed by a dash, then a capitalized word. And she does that more than once, so I can only assume it was proper usage for the time. As for _Gone with the Wind_, I’ve never gotten past the first few pages, I find it so desperately dull. But here’s a good example of bad dialect writing: the last time I went to read _Dracula_, I got totally bogged down in his “hilarious” rendition of the testimony of some low class guy, in some squirrely patois. It was frustrating and boring, and all the worse for knowing it was supposed to be funny. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_Torque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Max\_Torque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_Torque)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2008, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/56 "2008-09-19T15:29:48Z")
> [@winterhawk11](#): > > One that always bugs me is what I call “Niffleheim Syndrome,” in honor of H. Beam Piper and his “Little Fuzzy” series. It’s when an author falls in love with an unusual word and uses it so many times that it starts to get irritating. Good to know there’s a word for it. The first example of this that comes to mind is a science fiction book I read years ago, **Hellspark** by Janet Kagan. Apparently, Ms. Kagan’s very favorite word was “serendipity.” ---
**Author:** ![AuntiePam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2008, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/57 "2008-09-19T16:27:30Z")
> [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > When you first read “Gone With The Wind,” how much of the phonetic writng representing the slaves talking did you skip. These people had been born in the South, raised around cultured rich white Southerns and sounded like that? It’s believable. I wouldn’t want to emulate the people who owned me. Plus, a slave who talked like his owner would have all kinds of problems. The owner wouldn’t like it and neither would the other slaves. If you’re talking about Mammy in particular, her style of speech was one thing the O’Hara family had no control over. Alternatively, Mammy was so enthralled by the family that she wouldn’t think herself worthy of speaking like they did. (For all Mitchell’s talk about how the O’Hara girls feared and respected Mammy, they still did whatever they damn well pleased.) ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2008, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/58 "2008-09-19T16:30:39Z")
It is very hard for me to believe that people are honestly and unabashedly considering writers like Austen, Bronte, Eddison, Tolkien, and James “horrible”. They are all both expert craftsmen/women and genuine artists for reasons that are critically demonstrable. Their mastery of the English language is unmistakable and they are all perfectly comprehensible. What they all have is _flavor_. They do not write for the least common denominator. Not liking the flavor is fine. Every author is not for every person. Life is short, so read whatever you like. But to call something horrible just because you don’t like the flavor is pretty much opinion at its most pernicious. ---
**Author:** ![Gadarene](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Gadarene](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gadarene)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2008, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/59 "2008-09-19T16:42:34Z")
But **Maegs** …no one’s calling Austen/Bronte et al. horrible writers. They’re giving examples of what they consider to be horrible writing in otherwise good books. (Written, one would presume, by otherwise good writers.) Aren’t they? ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2008, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772/60 "2008-09-19T16:49:00Z")
> [@Gadarene](#): > > But **Maegs** …no one’s calling Austen/Bronte et al. horrible writers. They’re giving examples of what they consider to be horrible writing in otherwise good books. (Written, one would presume, by otherwise good writers.) > > Aren’t they? Not my impression, mon ami. The posts complain about Austen’s “byzantine sentence structure”, Tolkien and Eddison’s “turgid” prose, and how Wuthering Heights is a “template for soap operas”. I can pick out about 40 unfinished lines in Vergil’s Aeneid and show that he clearly had not gotten around to polishing them yet. These are isolated instances. The posters here seem to be referring not to singular imperfections but aspects of the writing that are as essential to the books as, say, plot and characterization. It is very hard for me to wrap my mind around liking Jane Austen despite her style. Her artistry is absolute: if she wrote the White Pages of 1791, I would probably like it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horrible-writing-in-otherwise-good-or-tolerable-books/463772.md?page=4)