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15 Prose Mistakes That Give Ameteurs Away; by Mumbling Sage of the TW
Topic Started: Jun 20 2008, 11:04 PM (345 Views)
Keira
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insanity comes with the rice package
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I found this on the TW and found it extremely helpful. In fact, taking this into consideration, I am going to go back and edit my story, because I saw things on here I didn't even think about and you know, their right.

Here's the original link if you would like to look at it: 15 Prose Mistakes That Give Ameteurs Away
Mumbling Sage
 
1. Too Many Prepositions. ‘Too many’ being the operative word here, since of course prepositions are needed. It’s just that they aren’t always needed where they’re put. For example, in the fiction of my younger years, and frequently in a story I once beta-read, characters did not walk, they ‘walked forwards’. It seems this is to assure the reader they are not walking backwards.

A similar problem is too many prepositions in one sentence: ‘They walked forwards towards the girl sitting under the tree’. It’s not a bad sentence, but the frequency of prepositions in it gives it an odd rhythm. ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ also has a rhythm, in the way each noun has an adjective (or two) describing it. Try to avoid this, or your reader will find themselves nodding their head or tapping a foot as they read in time to a beat they don’t consciously notice.


2. Quantifiers. Phrases like ‘a few’, ‘every so often’, ‘once in a while’, ‘a couple of’ and ‘occasionally’ suggest that a specific number isn’t really needed, therefore making the circumstances sound important. ‘Every so often I saw a guy’s head being ripped off’, nothing special or noteworthy, right?

3. ‘At random’. In a real, published book (Robert Newcomb’s ‘The Fifth Sorceress’) I found the sentence ‘severed limbs were scattered at random’. This sentence is disturbing not only because of its semantic content, nor the redundancy of ‘scattered’ and ‘at random’, but because of the inference that somehow, somewhere, there are severed limbs being scattered deliberately and methodically.

4. The –ing Mistake. Words ending with –ing occur simultaneous to the action in the rest of the sentence. ‘Running up the stairs, she opened the door’ is an impossibility. You can’t open a door while running up the stairs.

5. The Wrong Word. Not just ‘your/you’re’ or ‘to/too/two’ but ‘then/than’, ‘allusion/illusion’, and ‘affect/effect’.

6. Political Campaign Words. Or Courtroom words. Or words that you’d hear at the Geneva convention. Any word that is overformalized or too modern or ‘politically correct’ for the situation. Often occurs in fantasy. Examples: ‘civil rights’, ‘trauma’, ‘assertive’, ‘authoritarian’, ‘special needs’, the concept of ‘war crimes’, ‘on a regular basis’.
6.5 ‘Eye of Argon’ Words. Named after the truly horrible fantasy story (read at Sci-Fi conventions aloud; the last person to give up reading from laughter wins). Examples: wench, steed, the word ‘lustily’ in any context, thrust, ferocious, lest

7. Flat Description. By this I mean ‘She had red hair and wore a red dress.’ This does not mean you have to work description into action, but you should make description active. ‘Red hair flowed to her shoulders.’ ‘She bowed in a ripple of red silk.’ ‘Her smile was wide and toothier than he had expected.’

8. Revealing Character Traits with Adjectives and Adverbs. ‘He laughed manically’. ‘She smiled evilly.’ Pretty self-explanatory. Don’t spoon-feed character development to your readers.

9. ‘Said-bookisms’ have been discussed often enough. Just use the word ‘said’, or ‘asked’ if they’re asking a question. Avoid adverbs unless they add something not immediately obvious, like if someone is being sarcastic. Avoid synonyms for said unless they are more accurate and not distracting.

10. ‘Then’ or ‘After That’ as Transitions. These make it sound as if your character is following directions in a recipe or crossing out items on a to-do list.

11. Relying on a Cliché to do your Description. ‘They entered the haunted mansion’. This simply does not do. Tell us what the haunted mansion looks like, even if you have to repeat the occasional cliché to do it—but don’t just have the reader pull up a mental file on ‘haunted house’ and use that as the setting of your story. Make things different enough that your typical ‘haunted house’ won’t fit.

12. Exclamation Points! They can be used in dialog. Otherwise, they don’t make the reader feel excited, they make you sound sugar-high.

13. Characters Who Sound Like Teenagers. Even if they are teenagers, it is annoying. Have a higher breed of protagonist.
13.5 Characters who sound like narrators. ‘He looked at me in utter shock’ might be okay in from a first-person POV, but it should never be used in dialog. Real people don’t talk like that.

14. Using $40 words when $10 ones will do. Or even cheaper. Only use a thesaurus if 1. You’d repeat a word otherwise or 2. The word you have isn’t completely accurate, and you can’t think of a better one off the top of your head.

15. Words like ‘just’, ‘even’ or ‘almost’ when used like ‘He just stood there’ (‘he stood there’ is good enough, ‘he only stood there’ or ‘he simply stood there’ sound more serious and less like teenagers), ‘he couldn’t even remember the page number’ (‘even’ if overquantifying it and, as I have been informed, sounds both teenagerish and amateurish), or ‘she stood up almost quickly’ (what is ‘almost quickly’? Average speed? If someone isn’t doing the action completely or doing it completely the way you’re describing it, find another word).
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