I get unreasonably annoyed with the word “murmer”. I roll my eyes when characters “murmer” something. I don’t even know if I’ve ever murmered. Just the sound of the word makes my upper lip begin to curl.
Not that I would call it bad writing, but bad mechanics: the misuse or, more often, absence of semicolons in books not only by bad authors, but respected ones, is baffling. Why haven’t editors told Joyce Carole Oates about these fabled semicolons? Are they afraid it will slow her down?
“Misspellings sometimes happen,” she murmured.
It bothers me when authors put themselves in their books. Mr. Cussler, I’m looking at you.
Worst offender ever: Nick Hornby. His one book written from a female viewpoint had her comparing lots of the book’s scenarios to scenes out of Star Wars. While I don’t doubt that there are some women who might do this, it did strike me as absurdly convenient that a well-known geeky-blokey author, writing a woman’s voice for the first time, gave her a stereotypically geeky-blokey voice. Do they not have editors, these people?
Vonnegut once opined that semicolons are unnecessary. I think he’s usually right. My experience is that semicolons usually mean “I am stapling a sentence fragment to the end of this sentence.”
And when the author puts himself in the book as the literal center of the universe, it’s just plain creepy. I’m reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower books right now, and they’re very good, but the bit where his fictional characters think of him as God and/or The Man Who Makes Things Real… it weirds me out.
I admit to not using semi-colons very often, in fact I think I’m 57k into my NanoWriMo and haven’t used one once. Maybe I should look into that…
I’ve been burned by spellcheckers many, many times. Without paying attention, I accept the checker’s substitution. Much later, I’ll realize it switched words on me. :smack: A few letters makes a big difference. Especially something I’m turning in to my boss.
Dean Koontz likes preternatural too.
Ditto on King’s foreshadowing, but what he does is so obvious that foreshadowing is probably the wrong word to describe it. It adds a wee bit of tension but removes the element of surprise. He spoils his own books.
Another aspect of bad writing (and it’s been mentioned) is poor characterization, particularly with villains. Unless your villain is an alien or a vampire or a rabid dog (or in a James Bond novel), you need to give him some ambiguity. Humans aren’t all good or all bad, and a villain who’s all bad is boring.
They certainly shouldn’t mean that. When a semicolon is used to join clauses they must both be independent; using one to append a fragment would be an error in syntax. It would be unconscionable; a gratuitous violation of correct grammar.
And even aliens and vampires need convincing motivations! It’s lazy writing either way to have villains who are bad just for the sake of the plot.
Very prevalent in 1930s science fiction, which often had a bit of dialog like this:
Tom went to the wall and flipped a switch. "Isn’t it amazing that when I do this a stream of electrons we call electricity flows through a wire in the wall, created by massive generating plants many miles away, and the, with the switch now closed, flows through a filament in a globe of glass we call a light bulb, where the resistance causes the filament to glow and thus light the room. "
This bit of dialog was sometimes preceded by “as you know” which just made it worse.
I would know better than to use a semicolon there, but I am often uncertain what punctuation mark to use to apend such a fragment. A simple comma perhaps? A hyphen? What?
Not a book, but CSI is notorious for having the techs explain things to each other. Or the coroner will explain things to the techs. Or the lab guys will explain things to the techs.
Say what you want about ER, but it took me a few episodes to figure out what the hell LOC meant when the paramedics were wheeling in a gurney. That’s all they hollered and we got stuck with having to noodle it out for ourselves.
I’ll go with the opposite of this: narrative that reads like dialogue. Granted, I mostly see this in “amateur” fiction posted on story message boards. Then somebody will criticize it in the comments, and the author will get all defensive and claim, “I’m just writing like I would talk!” They just don’t grasp that there should be a clear distinction between dialogue and narrative. I’ve read some stories where the only distinction was the quotation marks around the dialogue. I’m sorry, the fact that your story is set in East L.A. and your main characters are black does not mean that the narrative should be written in hip-hop slang.
I suppose part of the problem, though, is the “message board” aspect. These people are accustomed to writing in a conversational style when participating in what is, essentially, a conversation, and they can’t draw a distinction between that and a story. So maybe it’s the medium getting in the way (and some have come out and confessed that they actually compose their stories in the text box, rather than writing the story in a text editor or word processor and then copy/pasting it into the text box).
Oh dear Og, yes. My thoughts on Michael Crichton exactly. I had seen and enjoyed The Andromeda Strain a few times without realizing there was a novel version. So when I spotted the novel I decided to pick it up and read it … and spent the entire time feeling like I was reading a script.
Agreed. OTOH, in my own writing (mostly erotic fiction of the kinkier variety) providing a physical description is somewhat more necessary. Having a firm picture of the character in my mind helps me with characterization, so most of my characters are based physically either on somebody I know (something I’ve tried to get away from in recent years because it was getting to where every time I’d interact with the real person I couldn’t avoid thinking about my little pornographic story with the character who looks just like them) or on a photo of a model I’ve found on the Internet (which avoids the aforementioned problem since I’m unlikely to ever meet the model in person). Even so, I don’t go into excruciating detail describing a character’s appearance; I give a “general” description (… Becky was a cute blonde …) and only go into more specific detail if the plot makes it necessary.
I would have a problem with a character speaking in acronyms that, while they are written shorthand, they are the opposite when spoken. i.e. “Gee-ess-doubleyou” (5 syllables) vs. “gunshot wound” (3 syllables), or for that matter, speaking an acronym that isn’t any kind of verbal shorthand at all (“Yes, I’m an HS graduate!”) Of course, I guess some people do that in real life.
Library of Congress? Come on, man. What does that mean.
LOC = loss of consciousness. (I think.)
Yep.
This bugs me too. A word or two here or there I can tolerate. It’s when all of a sudden, you see a phrase in a foriegn lanugage…which is the same language they are supposed to be Speaking. It makes you wonder why that passage just seemed to fail to be translated.
The Film King Arthur did this with Roman “knights” accompanying monks, who all of a sudden start speaking in Latin.
So what were they speaking before that they could all understand each other?
I’ve read a translation of Les Miserables that had certain passages in French, with no translation in the text. It’s really annoying when the entire book is set in France and you presume all the characters are speaking French(translated for your convience).
The Corollary to that would be words that stick out because they sound suspiciously foreign to the culture/time period/setting. Using the word “Valkryie”(very German) in a story set in Ancient China is going to stick out like a sore thumb.
Hah! I need to put this in the thread of stupid things I always forget. Though in this case, always means once, as I’ve never had occasion to write this word before, and hope never to again. Yesterday, I couldn’t spell “burden” without looking it up. I tell you, after a certain unnamed age, things start escaping your brain, never to return.
My daughter turned in a high-school paper last spring describing “Troy of Feces”. I finally figured out it was supposed to be about the play “Fences”. Spellcheck 1, proofreader 0.
As to “It would be unconscionable; a gratuitous violation of correct grammar.” - I would replace the semicolon with a comma.