I was reading one of Robert Ludlum’s “Bourne” novels, and came across two crucial lines of dialogue in French. At first, I thought this was a pretty novel trick to make the reader actually learn something (The meaning could be deciphered from several key words). Later, I encountered a FULL PAGE of dialogue in French. I was less than pleased.
A comma would be fine. I believe one could also use a colon, but I’m not an expert on the usage of colons.
Semicolons are important things in the toolkit of a writer. Properly used, they allow a writer to present two independent clauses while implying that the clauses should be read together and are somehow related.
Nothing bothers me more than seeing a word used that’s not quite what the author intended. Especially when it’s a long word and I assume the author is trying to sound smart or witty.
The example that always comes to mind is a sequence in “The Boondock Saints,” in which one character uses the word “fuck” about a dozen times in one sentence to represent pretty much every part of speech. Another character quips, “Really illustrates the diversity of the word.” But “diversity” really isn’t the right word to use there. “Versatility,” perhaps?
Thank you. 
I think either one could work.
Jack Vance would be completely dead in the water without semicolons. 
What bugs me the most about bad writing is clunky language. After reading Patrick O’Brien and Jack Vance, my tolerance for inept phrasing is about nil. I started The DaVinci Code and dropped it after two paragraphs; the language just didn’t sing.
Best way I learned of dealing with this is cutting out the tags altogether.
‘‘Do you get what I mean?’’ Olives wiggled her toes inquisitively.
Vifslan scratched the back of his head. ‘‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’’
Yeah, but code switching between two native speakers is way more common than code switching when a native speaker is talking to a non-native speaker in a second language. There is no rational reason to do so, because the other person presumably won’t understand what is being said. I have a friend who speaks fluent Mandarin; he code switches all the time in conversations with his Mommy, but has code switched in conversation with monolingual English speakers approximately zero times.
See, I would almost think that’s the author poking fun at the character’s ineptitude with language. Especially if the rest of the work is intelligently written. It is exactly the sort of thing that a smart-but-not-incredibly-well-educated person would say.
The implication that they’re expressing articulate thoughts by means of toe-wiggling and back-of-the-head-scratching is irresistible.
I am lazy, and I am not about to read through all three pages, so I am not sure whether my pet peeve has been mentioned. As it stands, I do not care if I am repeating someone else.
The thing I hate most about reading bad writing is that the bad writer managed to get published. Someone actually got paid to churn out that crap, and someone else paid good money to have it printed and distributed.
Speaking as an unpublished hack writer, that really chaps my hide.
That’s the spirit!
Yeah, I can relate to this one. When the ‘‘Gossip Girl’’ novels first came out, I was furious.
Drives me mad, too. There’s a chronic shortage of places for “New” writers to get published in Australia, and yet every time I go to the bookstore there are (quite literally) tables full of crap books for $4 each, many of which are of the “Twentysomething career woman in London/New York who loves shopping and being a social butterfly but can’t find a man because she comes across as a high-maintenance shallow gold-digger with too much baggage” variety.
And it bothers me that crap like that gets published in such quantities, but I can’t even get a 5,000 word short story published anywhere that anyone is likely to ever see it. :mad:
I call it Expository Dialogue. In prose the narrator can (& probably should) do any necessary exposition, but it’s a common device in drama/cinema/cartooning.
I caught part of some TV show I’d never seen before the other night (not sure what it’s called, but Christian Slater was in it), and from what I saw the dialogue consisted entirely of exposition. There was a whole conversation between Slater and his (ex?) wife that was basically “Do you remember when our daughter was kidnapped? You did THIS.” “Yes, I do remember. And then I did THAT. Do you remember?” “Yes, and then this happened!” “Well do I recall, and then we did SOMETHING ELSE, which you no doubt remember because you were there!” :rolleyes:
I’ve been seeing a real decline in proper punctuation in online amateur fiction over the last few years. If you want to call yourself a writer, the basic mechanical rules are NOT optional. Even if you’re attempting to depict poor grammar on the character’s part, it still should be punctuated properly.
I haven’t seen the decline in the very basics spread to print books yet, but is this the shape of things to come:
Style and word choice issues aside, is Dan Brown’s punctuation really that bad, and does his publisher actually print it that way?
And on a different tack, aren’t English’s overloaded operators fun:
Thanks to overriding punctuation and capitalization rules, it’s possible to misinterpret Olivesmarch4th’s first example as an improperly used tag, but the second one is punctuated unambiguously as a separate action. It can only be parsed as a misused tag if the first period had been a comma instead.
*** Ponder
songs. i.e. songs in LOTR, Redwall, etc.
I agree, that’s something writers who are experts in specific fields are often guilty of. Write for an audience of intelligent people who are interested in the subject matter but who, unlike you, aren’t (necessarily) experts.
Yeah, but I made sure to put two spaces between the first and second sentence in order to make it as clear as possible. If I had only used one space, I could see your point. 
What’s worse than this is when the writer misspells a word to indicate the speaker is a sort of bumpkin even when the misspelling wouldn’t change the pronunciation of the word. For example a character says “you must of had a rough night, Bubba!” Almost any native English speaker would pronounce “must have” as “must of” in that context. What help to the reader is the colloquial spelling? Is as if the writer is implying that the character would not be able to spell the words he speaks. I’ve seen even good writers fall back on this tactic.
Readers can’t rely on double spacing to help them parse sentences. However you might have typed it, the reader’s browser will render it as one space (and that’s the official HTML standard, BTW), unless you force them into reading it with a non-proportional font. Most dead-tree publishers were doing that for decades before the rise of the web, anyway. See this thread. I double-space after all my sentences too, but you’re not going to see it unless you quote my post and read it in the edit window.
That’s not a colloquial spelling, or a misspelling. The character used an informal/ungrammatical construct, and the writer properly spelled it in that example.
My point is that no one can know that the character used that kind of a construct since it would sound exactly like the proper construct. The other characters in the scenario would not pick up any note of colloquialism based on what they’re hearing. It’s as if the author is
a) having the character transcribe his own dialogue and b) transcribe it incompetently.