Bothersome Words and Phrases

I think I said that I have roughly a decade of copy editing experience behind me (through high school, college, and three years of professional), and one of the things I've compiled in all these years is an intense dislike of certain words and phrases in the English language.

So here's the list (and if you include these in a story you send me to beta, they will be marked):

1. "Needless to say" -- If it's a phrase you don't need to say, then why are you saying it?

2. "Irregardless" -- This means the same thing as regardless, and isn't a word itself.

3. "Could care less" -- A corruption of the phrase "couldn't care less."

4. "Should of," "could of," "would of" -- I don't see this from writers so much as from non-writers. They write this when they mean "should've," "could've," or "would've."

5. "Due to the fact that" -- a wordy phrase than can easily be replaced by the word "because."

That's pretty much all I can think of right now. What are some words or phrases that bother you?

There Are No Rules (Save One)

Before I get into my reasoning for the post title, I have to give a little personal background.

I've never been the best student in the world. You were more likely to find me goofing off in junior high and high school rather than hitting the books -- I managed to skate through most of my classes with fairly good grades because of how fast I'm able to learn things. I'm not kidding when I say that. Information that some people take weeks to learn I can take in and accurately use within a quarter to half that time. I once wrote a philosophy of religion paper comparing the theories of three philosophers while only having read one paragraph of each document. And it took me 20 minutes to write the paper, whereas my best friend (who was also in the class) took hours to do so.

I tend to be either the student teachers love or the one they hate because I get the material without even really trying. I'd think someone like me was annoying as all get out were I a teacher. Which I don't plan on ever being, much to my mother's dismay (mom teaches ESL to adults).

So here's my theory when it comes to writing: There are no rules.

Let me elaborate. There are dozens of style guides in existence for all forms of writing -- medical, academic, fiction, journalistic, technical, etc. -- the list goes on and on. Then there's disagreement within the same style guides depending on which edition of the guide you follow. For example, The Associated Press re-issues their style guide every year, and every year at least one thing changes. That means if you have a style guide from four years ago it's basically worthless.

The vaunted "rules" that we hear about in school aren't, in point of fact, rules at all. They're conventions that have been agreed upon by teachers and grammarians nationwide and spoon-fed down the line to the students. A perfect example is the axiom to "never start a sentence with the word 'and.'" This is a fallacy because you can start a sentence with the word "and." The problem you run into is that it's hard to make the sentence complete when you start it with words like "and" or "but." But you can do it. See? One so-called rule shattered.

You really start getting into mass confusion once it's understood that all our "rules" exist because 60 percent of the English language is derived from Latin, a language that is so rules-based it's ridiculous. Because X, where X is a particular grammar rule, is an impossibility in Latin, it's considered bad form in English. Then you find out that Latin didn't actually have any punctuation. No periods. Or commas. Or semicolons.

What, you may ask, was the result of all this linguistic theorizing? A healthy dislike of grammar textbooks for one, and the realization that I can edit a whole lot better by simply reading the text out loud rather than asking myself if I've followed all the "rules" in the sentence. Parts of speech? Not my forte. Do I know what a compound modifier is?* Or a gerund? Can I explain the past participle form and when to use it? Nope. Not a single one.

Does lacking that knowledge make me less of a skilled writer? I don't think so. It certainly doesn't make me any less of a well-versed editor. In fact it probably helps, because I edit from an emotional and not technical standpoint (I had to retake the SAT for a tutoring position at one point and I disagreed with several answers they said were right). And emotional editing is what you need when it comes to fiction because really, who cares if it's technically correct but doesn't impact the reader?

So all the rules that we've been taught in school of what makes writing good can be thrown out the window right? Maybe. The text still has to be understandable, after all. There's also one rule, and only one, that you can't break when it comes to fiction.

What is it, you ask? Well that's an easy answer.

Tell an interesting story.

P.S. Don't forget about the Ten-Word Novel Contest! Only nine more days to enter, and the competition's getting fierce!

P.P.S. To Adam Heine -- I finished Air Pirates and will email my critique to you by Christmas Eve at the latest.

* I do know what a compound modifier is, but only because I learned that while working as a copy editor at a newspaper.

The Department of Redundancy Department

I spent two years working on a newspaper copy desk. During that time, my coworkers and I collected examples of what we'd termed the "Department of Redundancy Department." Some reporters were notorious for saying the same thing twice, or even repeating themselves in the stories (notice the example in the previous sentence).

Now, redundancy isn't confined to repeating yourself. There are such things in writing as what I call redundant actions (or description) -- things that you don't need to say because more concise text already assumes said action is taking place.

For example: "She turned her head to look east across the desert."

This is redundant because the act of turning to look means that you're turning your head. Even deeper is the action "to look," which can stand on its own in the sentence.

Now here's the revamped version: "She looked east across the desert."

See how much stronger that sentence is now?

Redundancy is good in some areas (the space shuttle, cars, electronics, etc) but not in writing. The potential for slowing down the pace of the tale and jarring the reader from the story is too great. Mind you, redundancy is not the same thing as repeating a piece of information to draw attention to it. Especially when the original tidbit was supposed to be foreshadowing and now your MC has figured out what it means. That's just plain tying up loose ends.

The easiest way to avoid this, in my opinion, is to read your text out loud. You can hear the redundancy much more easily when speaking the words than reading them on the page. I don't know why that is, just that doing so has helped me numerous times in the past.

What examples of redundancy have you seen?

Word Choice and Slang

One of the bigger problems I have with writing semi-period pieces (i.e. Steampunk set at a particular societal level) is that I have to find slang words that fit the story. Things like the word "Hey!" and "Oi!" might not work as exclamations to get someone's attention because they sound too modern.

So I end up trolling the dictionary for words that are at least as old as the time period my stories roughly take place in. With CALLARION AT NIGHT, that means going for Victorian England. With SON OF MAGIC (my completed MS), I have to aim for either creating my own words or using ones that have etymologies at least back to the 14th Century. That way I can be certain of the word not pulling people out of the story.

This can be crazy-making sometimes, especially when my crit group finds a word and says "That's too modern." And then I go back to the drawing board (mind you, I adore my critique group -- they're a talented bunch that have laser-guided eyesight for each class of my traditional errors. And they put up with me taking the proverbial red pen to their works. So I'm happy.).

I know I'm not the only one who has this problem (Gary, I'm looking at you), but I'm curious about how other writers of historical fiction/fantasy deal with the word choice issue.

Bad writing

My Editing professor in college (a wonderful spitfire of a woman) had the funniest name for bad writing in business -- "Bizcrap" she called it -- because that's what it was. Crappy writing that people in the business world produced and, to her surprise, used.

(This is the same woman who told my Editing class that she refused to give us a grade on one assignment because reading it made her eyes bleed. Can you tell I learned a lot from her?)

But anyway, the point of this post is that bad writing is far too prevalent in modern society. Some people say email is creating a nation of bad writers. The ease of communication email presents means that we spend less time on crafting an effective letter to co-workers and friends. Why bother, when you can dash it off in two minutes and click send, knowing that it will get there immediately?

Some companies are thankfully striking back at this epidemic of poor grammar, as this 2005 NBC Nightly News story shows. Reading that story, though old, gave me a warm feeling inside (then again that could be the coffee ... but I digress).

The point is that we shouldn't succumb to the temptation of dashing off any sort of correspondence without taking the time to read over it. You wouldn't send a poorly written novel off to a publisher (hope springs eternal) would you?