Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15
The good news is that many contemporary linguists agree that we learn grammar through usage, not instruction. My prescription for you, if you have problems in this area, is twofold.
First, read. Read a wide array of books, including those biggies you pretended to read in high school but never did. Reread your favorites. You will begin to subconsciously develop an ear for proper usage.
I caution you to make your reading broad so that you don’t inadvertently start to mimic any one writer’s voice. That sort of mimicry is not necessarily a bad thing and, in fact, is probably inevitable for writers just starting out. But if you’ve been at this enterprise for a decade or more, it’s time to develop your own unique voice and avoid the derivative.
I’ll hold off on the bad news for the time being, except to say that I’ve come to believe you can’t become completely proficient with language just by reading. Some instruction is in order.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Monday, September 17, 2007
Things the dogs learned this summer: Part 2
Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 14
The dogs are on a bit of a different learning curve, so each will have to give his final lesson separately.
Lesson #4 from Kasay: Ice eating is a delicious way to stay hydrated.
Lesson #4B: Doh! Where’d my ice go?! 
Oooohhh yeah…I mean, DON'T try to save it for later. I don’t know why I can’t keep that one straight. Must develop a mnemonic device…Chew it fast, for it won’t last? ICE = It Can Expire? Eat it when it’s dealt or it will melt?
Lesson #5 from Brodsky (see above three pics): Hamming for the camera is a sign of immaturity. Keep your face turned away from the paparazzi at all times.
Oh no! They caught me! How embarrassing. [Or maybe he is humiliated by his owner's socks-with-sandals fashion faux pas. Hey, I was just trying to keep the skeeters off my ankles.]
Lesson #5A: Best to have a good sense of humor when cornered. Punching out the paparazzi only leads to trouble, or so my parole officer tells me.
The dogs are on a bit of a different learning curve, so each will have to give his final lesson separately.
Lesson #4 from Kasay: Ice eating is a delicious way to stay hydrated.
Lesson #4A: But be sure to save some of your ice for later. It will make a lovely midnight snack.
Lesson #4B: Doh! Where’d my ice go?! Oooohhh yeah…I mean, DON'T try to save it for later. I don’t know why I can’t keep that one straight. Must develop a mnemonic device…Chew it fast, for it won’t last? ICE = It Can Expire? Eat it when it’s dealt or it will melt?Lesson #5 from Brodsky (see above three pics): Hamming for the camera is a sign of immaturity. Keep your face turned away from the paparazzi at all times.
Oh no! They caught me! How embarrassing. [Or maybe he is humiliated by his owner's socks-with-sandals fashion faux pas. Hey, I was just trying to keep the skeeters off my ankles.]
Lesson #5A: Best to have a good sense of humor when cornered. Punching out the paparazzi only leads to trouble, or so my parole officer tells me.
Friday, September 14, 2007
DD: Things the dogs learned this summer: Part 1
Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 10
We got the tiniest sheen of drizzle last night—the first time it’s rained in weeks—and it knocked the edge off the heat. Today it’s not supposed to reach the 80s, and it hasn’t been that pleasant in months. So this is a good time to look at the summer of '07 in the rearview and see what lessons it held. For the dachshunds, of course. I am beyond learning much about summer except it seems to be getting longer and hotter.
Here we go. You might want to take some notes on this.
Lesson #1: Weeds grow even in a drought. Help your owner with the pruning chores.
Lesson #2: Eat plenty of green leafy vegetables for hydration and antioxidants.
We got the tiniest sheen of drizzle last night—the first time it’s rained in weeks—and it knocked the edge off the heat. Today it’s not supposed to reach the 80s, and it hasn’t been that pleasant in months. So this is a good time to look at the summer of '07 in the rearview and see what lessons it held. For the dachshunds, of course. I am beyond learning much about summer except it seems to be getting longer and hotter.
Here we go. You might want to take some notes on this.
Lesson #1: Weeds grow even in a drought. Help your owner with the pruning chores.
Lesson #2: Eat plenty of green leafy vegetables for hydration and antioxidants.
Lesson #3: In the summer, it's best to stay on top of the blanket.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
The grammar wars con't.
Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 7
So which side do we represent in this war? Are we judging entries with the eagle eyes of the rules keepers or the freewheeling nonchalance of the grammar bohemians?
Brian and I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, between those two extremes but admittedly closer to the former camp than the latter. If the grammar and mechanics errors in a piece are rampant, we do lower the presentation score. Someone who wants to be a writer but has no understanding of the fundamentals is conveying laziness and a lack of respect for the medium.
It’s like a painter who doesn’t know how to mix colors. You can’t cut corners and skip ahead from basic skills to advanced execution. You have to put in the effort and learn how to use your artistic tools, and your tools are words. Expecting someone else to fix it all for you later is not only arrogant but naïve. No one else is going to care about your work as much as you do.
Improper use of language is a burden on your reader. You know what you’re trying to say, but if you completely ignore the rules of language, your reader will likely become frustrated and have to read each sentence multiple times, mentally inserting the proper punctuation and filling in the gaps in order to make sense of your work. If that is the case, you have failed in your attempt to express yourself. And don’t tell me you had to reread Shakespeare or Faulkner’s sentences in order to understand them. There is a difference between writing that is difficult to read because it is complex and writing that is incomprehensible because it follows no known conventions of language.
Now that I’ve ticked off the grammar bohos, let me add that we understand that grammar is ever-changing, and we don’t cling stubbornly to outdated rules or feel the need to enforce rules just for the principle of the matter. Too, we know that formatting and punctuation errors beyond the author’s control sometimes happen in cyberspace, so we are not taking five points off for every misused comma or anything like that. We don’t penalize for minor errors that don’t interfere with readability (or, of course, that seem intentional and effectively serve a function in the entry). Grammar mistakes tend to fade into the background and be forgotten in the presence of a well-crafted, original plot, fascinating characters, and sparkling dialogue, and those higher-order concerns are what jump out at us most of all.
But when we read an entry that excels in those other categories but also doesn’t have any glaring errors, it shows us that the piece has been carefully edited, that the writer is probably well read and knowledgeable about his craft, and that he has put as much time and passion into the revision as he put into the writing, and we find that impressive. Those are the entries that get an immediate ticket to the ‘yes’ stack.
So which side do we represent in this war? Are we judging entries with the eagle eyes of the rules keepers or the freewheeling nonchalance of the grammar bohemians?
Brian and I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, between those two extremes but admittedly closer to the former camp than the latter. If the grammar and mechanics errors in a piece are rampant, we do lower the presentation score. Someone who wants to be a writer but has no understanding of the fundamentals is conveying laziness and a lack of respect for the medium.
It’s like a painter who doesn’t know how to mix colors. You can’t cut corners and skip ahead from basic skills to advanced execution. You have to put in the effort and learn how to use your artistic tools, and your tools are words. Expecting someone else to fix it all for you later is not only arrogant but naïve. No one else is going to care about your work as much as you do.
Improper use of language is a burden on your reader. You know what you’re trying to say, but if you completely ignore the rules of language, your reader will likely become frustrated and have to read each sentence multiple times, mentally inserting the proper punctuation and filling in the gaps in order to make sense of your work. If that is the case, you have failed in your attempt to express yourself. And don’t tell me you had to reread Shakespeare or Faulkner’s sentences in order to understand them. There is a difference between writing that is difficult to read because it is complex and writing that is incomprehensible because it follows no known conventions of language.
Now that I’ve ticked off the grammar bohos, let me add that we understand that grammar is ever-changing, and we don’t cling stubbornly to outdated rules or feel the need to enforce rules just for the principle of the matter. Too, we know that formatting and punctuation errors beyond the author’s control sometimes happen in cyberspace, so we are not taking five points off for every misused comma or anything like that. We don’t penalize for minor errors that don’t interfere with readability (or, of course, that seem intentional and effectively serve a function in the entry). Grammar mistakes tend to fade into the background and be forgotten in the presence of a well-crafted, original plot, fascinating characters, and sparkling dialogue, and those higher-order concerns are what jump out at us most of all.
But when we read an entry that excels in those other categories but also doesn’t have any glaring errors, it shows us that the piece has been carefully edited, that the writer is probably well read and knowledgeable about his craft, and that he has put as much time and passion into the revision as he put into the writing, and we find that impressive. Those are the entries that get an immediate ticket to the ‘yes’ stack.
Monday, September 10, 2007
The grammar wars
Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 5
Grammar: such an oddly touchy subject among writers. There are two warring camps on this subject.
There are the rules keepers—those writers who feel they know the rules and become agitated at others’ errors. Some extremists are frozen in time, insisting people adhere to outdated rules. These old-school purists do not approve of splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions, despite what the latest edition of the Holt Handbook permits. They take care to avoid any such manual published within the last few decades, so they neither know which former grammar no-no’s have become acceptable, nor do they want to know.
Ironically, rules keepers are plagued with a curse. Anyone who writes about grammar or rails against some usage pet peeve in print will have, embedded in her diatribe, at least one grammatical error. I remember when Brian first pointed out this phenomenon to me years ago, and I have yet to see it disproven. It is some kind of inevitability, perhaps a joke the universe plays on us to remind us that perfection is unattainable.
The copyeditors (professional rules keepers, no less) of a nearby major metropolitan newspaper have a contest each year to see who can locate the first typo or grammatical error in the latest edition of the AP Stylebook (you know, journalists’ grammar bible). It never takes them more than 30 minutes to find one. C’mon, I bet you can locate one in this very blog entry, though I promise I haven’t intentionally put any in.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are the grammar bohemians who play free and loose with language. They don’t worry about grammar, either believing it’s a waste of time and something for lowly proofreaders and editors--not true artistes--to fret over, or thinking their intentional disregard of grammatical conventions is essential to their unique writing style and conveys some deeper meaning. They see themselves as iconoclastic rebels, and they view the rules keepers as dull pedants.
Grammar: such an oddly touchy subject among writers. There are two warring camps on this subject.
There are the rules keepers—those writers who feel they know the rules and become agitated at others’ errors. Some extremists are frozen in time, insisting people adhere to outdated rules. These old-school purists do not approve of splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions, despite what the latest edition of the Holt Handbook permits. They take care to avoid any such manual published within the last few decades, so they neither know which former grammar no-no’s have become acceptable, nor do they want to know.
Ironically, rules keepers are plagued with a curse. Anyone who writes about grammar or rails against some usage pet peeve in print will have, embedded in her diatribe, at least one grammatical error. I remember when Brian first pointed out this phenomenon to me years ago, and I have yet to see it disproven. It is some kind of inevitability, perhaps a joke the universe plays on us to remind us that perfection is unattainable.
The copyeditors (professional rules keepers, no less) of a nearby major metropolitan newspaper have a contest each year to see who can locate the first typo or grammatical error in the latest edition of the AP Stylebook (you know, journalists’ grammar bible). It never takes them more than 30 minutes to find one. C’mon, I bet you can locate one in this very blog entry, though I promise I haven’t intentionally put any in.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are the grammar bohemians who play free and loose with language. They don’t worry about grammar, either believing it’s a waste of time and something for lowly proofreaders and editors--not true artistes--to fret over, or thinking their intentional disregard of grammatical conventions is essential to their unique writing style and conveys some deeper meaning. They see themselves as iconoclastic rebels, and they view the rules keepers as dull pedants.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
The winning ingredients: presentation
Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 3
Now here’s a mysterious category from the scorecard. Are we judging entries based on the quality of the paper they’re printed on or the fanciness of the packaging in which they arrive? No—it’s all online, remember.
So are we referring to submissions that come in with the formatting intact versus those that somehow get garbled in transmission and end up with triangles and accent marks where all the normal punctuation marks should be? No, we don’t hold mysterious formatting glitches against you.
‘Presentation’ simply means the entry’s language—its diction, syntax, tone. Entries that are well written receive high marks in this category. Keep in mind that ‘well written’ can mean rich and poetic writing or it can mean sparse, invisible writing, depending on what seems appropriate for a particular piece of fiction. As always, there are no black-and-white, one-size-fits-all rules where fiction is concerned.
Also falling under this category are
grammar and mechanics.
//cue the blood-curdling screams and horror movie music//
But we’ll talk more about that later.
Now here’s a mysterious category from the scorecard. Are we judging entries based on the quality of the paper they’re printed on or the fanciness of the packaging in which they arrive? No—it’s all online, remember.
So are we referring to submissions that come in with the formatting intact versus those that somehow get garbled in transmission and end up with triangles and accent marks where all the normal punctuation marks should be? No, we don’t hold mysterious formatting glitches against you.
‘Presentation’ simply means the entry’s language—its diction, syntax, tone. Entries that are well written receive high marks in this category. Keep in mind that ‘well written’ can mean rich and poetic writing or it can mean sparse, invisible writing, depending on what seems appropriate for a particular piece of fiction. As always, there are no black-and-white, one-size-fits-all rules where fiction is concerned.
Also falling under this category are
grammar and mechanics.
//cue the blood-curdling screams and horror movie music//
But we’ll talk more about that later.
Monday, September 3, 2007
Ding dong!
Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 1
This wicked summer is now officially dead (good riddance to triple-digit temperatures), and that means it’s changeover time for the writing contests. Final tally on entries for the Best Short-Short Story Contest: 197. We just barely beat last year’s number, but at least we did exceed it!
Here they are--our reading materials for the next few weeks:
Oh, and I apologize if I sounded harsh about early Best First Chapter entries last week. I didn’t mean you or your entry were disqualified forever and ever as part of some weird grudge against earlybirds, I just mean if you submitted before September 1, you need to resubmit during the submission period in order to qualify (9/1/07-3/1/08).
This wicked summer is now officially dead (good riddance to triple-digit temperatures), and that means it’s changeover time for the writing contests. Final tally on entries for the Best Short-Short Story Contest: 197. We just barely beat last year’s number, but at least we did exceed it!
Here they are--our reading materials for the next few weeks:
Oh, and I apologize if I sounded harsh about early Best First Chapter entries last week. I didn’t mean you or your entry were disqualified forever and ever as part of some weird grudge against earlybirds, I just mean if you submitted before September 1, you need to resubmit during the submission period in order to qualify (9/1/07-3/1/08).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
