Word Choice, 2
Dec. 9th, 2004 04:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaNow, at long last, the second half. LilyPichu's Finality.
Finality is a short story that's actually rather clever. The plot and the story's narrative structure are both good. There's a little kid standing around telling strangers that everyone will die.
The problems, sadly, are threefold, and they all tie back to vocabulary.
The first, interestingly, can be seen as early on as the summary. "We're all going to die." Yep, that's the words of a queer blonde haired kid with unusual blue eyes with a distinctive aura. Too bad it's true.
Now, how many of you, dear readers, see a mistake there? And how many don't but do, now that I mention it, sense something amiss?
They're rather minor errors – 'that' is a singular indefinite pronoun, and it's tied to the plural noun 'words'. There's also the problem of the double 'with' ("queer blonde haired kid with unusual blue eyes and a distinctive aura" would work, as would just dropping 'unusual blue eyes'). Along the same lines, you may notice how the vocabulary in the three sentences jumps from back and forth between formal and informal - yep is very informal, seen only in speech, while the description is something you'd expect to read as formal narration in a story, not hear. Finally, blonde is actually the feminine form of blond – and the kid happens to be a boy.
Why do I mention this? Because it highlights the problem – LilyPichu may have good ideas, but she just does not know how to get them down properly. Yes, they're minor, but there are four different problems in just three sentences.
The first paragraph (coming after the same line of dialogue shown in the summary) is:
The spoken words might have had a touch of amusement to it. Or perhaps a bold and audacious serious nature. But words were words. I had heard the little boy say it deliberately to a stranger, almost slowly. Like a trance. Or maybe merely mesmerizing curious and startled people with his chaste and virtuous behavior. However more, his brilliant cobalt eyes sparkled with a melancholy note. Or was it mischief? Frowning upon this incoherent statement, I had the nerves to walk up to the little boy repeating the same sentence.
This is just a single paragraph, but there's a lot questionable about it.
Firstly, you may notice that the sentences are choppy, incomplete. Although I don't believe sentence fragments are always wrong, they have to be used deliberately, and they need to sound better broken up then they would together. If you just drop a period in between a complete sentence, that's a problem.
The spoken words might have had a touch of amusement to it, or perhaps a bold and audacious serious nature.
There. This is less choppy. The feeling I get from story is a rather languid one, and choppy sentences don't fit that at all. Sentence fragments are typically used to indicate a half stop or restatement. (It didn't happen. Couldn't have.) If you're merely continuing an existing sentence, they don't work.
Now, notice the phrase "bold and audacious serious nature". Bold and audacious are synonyms. Although there are situations where listing two synonyms is acceptable, typically, they aren't linked usually with 'and'. (It was a dark, black night vs It was a dark and black night) Typically, pairing two synonyms together is also done for emphasis, and here that doesn't seem to be the case. The third dangling adjective 'serious' seems misplaced – what does it have to do with being bold and audacious? Interestingly, 'audacious' has the connotation that mildly contradicts 'serious' – it may refer to someone being foolhardy, overconfident, 'rushing in where angels fear to tread' and all that.
Also, this phrase is actually referring to the words. How can the words both sound like they have a 'touch of amusement' and a 'bold and audacious serious nature'? For that matter, why do the words *have* a nature? LilyPichu may have meant that the words showed the nature of the speaker, but that's not what the sentence says. Misattribution is a recurrent problem in this. At any rate, one typically wouldn't think amusement and seriousness would sound the same.
A third thing to notice is simply the sentence structure. Note the author's use of 'and' itself as a way of getting more adjectives into a sentence. This is a repeated device in her stories, as you'll see again by the fifth sentence.
Continuing, we see the sentence fragment "Like a trance." What is like a trance? Apparently, the *way* the boy is speaking. However, this isn't the correct use of the word. A trance is not a thing in and of itself, it's a state something else is in. What LilyPichu is trying to tell the reader is it was 'like he was in a trance' – but she doesn't know how to use the word, so the reader is left to add in the necessary other words themself.
Or maybe merely mesmerizing curious and startled people with his chaste and virtuous behavior. Here's a resurgence of the 'this and that' format the author uses. In the case of "curious and startled", the words don't seem to fit together – typically curiosity involves being interested in seeing more of something, while being startled means being surprised by something you weren't aware of. Also, the people are probably being startled by the boy, rather than the boy going up to people who are already startled. "Chaste and virtuous", on the other hand, do work fine paired together – my problem with this is that I'd sort of hope a little boy is chaste, seeing as being unchaste typically have a very strong sexual connotation (Chaste is typically used in connection with girls, much like virginal. It's also typically not used in connection to innocent childhood *behavior* but is more a state.) And is going around and telling people everyone's going to die really that chaste and virtuous?
The last sentence foreshadows a problem with the rest of the story. "Frowning upon this incoherent statement, I had the nerves to walk up to the little boy repeating the same sentence." To start, the previous sentence was neither a statement or incoherent, it was an uncertain observation where the narrator is unsure of how to interpret the boy's actions. If we're going to use technical language, let's get it right. Now, the narrator claims to "[have] the nerves," to walk up to the boy. Although the mental image I get from this of someone gathering up their many nerves into a bundle is amusing, when speaking about 'nerve', it's always singular. Nerve also means either courage or impudence, neither of which fit into the context. Next, notice that the last half of the sentence is in itself a repeat of what we've already been told, "…the little boy repeating the same sentence." This actually goes back to what I was mentioning about reusing description in Desiring a Friend. There is only one boy, and it's already been established he's saying this stuff to the adults around him. 'Repeating the same sentence' is also poorly placed. Did the narrator walk up while repeating the same sentence, or is 'repeating the same sentence' part of the boy's description? The reader can work it out from context, but a simple 'who was' would fix the problem.
All that about the first paragraph. You can see why this it lj-cut, huh?
His eyes were surprisingly penetrating, yet with the hint of beauty. Here, the adjectives are all being used properly. There's only one problem. LilyPichu uses 'yet' instead of 'and'. 'Yet' is used when the second idea contains something that would typically not be thought of in connection with the first. (The wall was rough-hewn, yet there were small patches of smoothness in the stone vs The wall was polished, yet it was smooth.) This is, yes, a rather minor thing, and it's easy to do. But add up enough minor problems and you wind up with a story that's both hard and unpleasant to read.
Was he kidding or was this perhaps a mischievous and cruel joke to strangers? There is, again, a subtle problem here. Mischievous typically means playful and without intentional cruelty. Sometimes (mischievous imps) it can mean playful and cruel, although this connotation is dying off. Either way, mischievous already has cruel in its meaning. So the sentence reads "perhaps a playful and cruel and cruel joke" or "perhaps a playful and not cruel and cruel joke". This is the author's love of using 'and' to pile on adjectives, and it leads to these sorts of problems.
thought I saw a glint of tears reflecting against his cerulean eyes before he turned away from me. They sparkled effectively, sorrowfully watching the people walk rapidly by. Here's another example of the misattribution. The tears are not sorrowfully watching people walk. The author's description here, while overly flowery, would work if she was more careful not to have the description link to the wrong thing.
We must have been pretty obscured, for no one had noticed a little blonde boy crying and a tall shabby figure next to him. One can only be obscured by something you see. The author's usage of the word suggests she doesn't actually know the meaning. Based on the story so far, 'obscured by' doesn't even fit, since the author keeps mentioning how they're in the middle of a crowd and no one pays attention.
I sighed, such a prerequisite action of me required to speak with a smooth tongue. This translates to "…such a requirement action of me required to speak…" which is not only redundant, but, like obscured, is just not how the word is used. I mentally reworded this as 'an action I needed to do in order to', which may have been what the author intended, but I can't be sure.
And I thought it had work as the little boy let out a high pitched and almost congenial laugh. I'll ignore simple grammatical error this time and just assume you can all see it. Here, synonym switching works fine – congenial means friendly. The problem is congenial's connotation. Congenial is a work that refers to friendly people like you, typically in a group of more than one. A social unit. Visualize a big Christmas party like one out of the flashbacks in A Christmas Carol, with a bunch of adults laughing and getting drunk. You could describe the laughter of one of the men there as congenial.
Connotation is probably the biggest problem with vocabulary I see. I recall reading the vocabulary sentence "The boy's leg was badly maimed so he couldn't walk for a year" on a poster at school, next to a picture of a boy with a cast on his leg. The kid who made it had read that 'maimed' meant injured and used it as such, unaware of the connotation of mangled and permanently disfigured. Misusing words has a ripple affect – someone else will read your misuse and pick up the wrong connotation, start using it like that, and someone else will read that…this is why it's so important to be sure you use the word correctly from the start.
The final sentence I'll point out is "It was such a tenacious speed of thought, but my adamant nature clung onto the concept." Kudos to anyone who can figure out exactly what's wrong there without me pointing it out.
And now, as a general comment over the whole of this story – it is being narrated entirely from the perspective of a single unnamed character, described as 'shabby'. Is the character honestly thinking in such a flowery overdescribed manner? This is told entirely in first person. In this case, authors should always keep in mind the character's vocabulary and personal way of phrasing things. I doubt anyone, ever, has actually thought like this. Unless they're carrying around a thesaurus and flipping through it as they go (which, come to think of it, would actually be rather interesting), I don't think they'd be using such obscure vocabulary so regularly. In the case of a first person narrator, an author should either construct an idea of how the character might talk and think, or if that's not possible (it is rather hard) they should try to use their own way of describing things and just try to avoid anything especially unfitting. This way, the narration will at least sound like an actual person.
So again. The story has an interesting idea, and that's probably the best thing about it. The way the story is told (as opposed to the word choice) is good. The description, once you translate it and if you ignore grammatical problems, is nothing impressive, but it's not outright bad. Decent, even. Unfortunately, in order to read the story you have to get through unnecessary and misused words, and this ruins it.
Now, it's pretty obvious the intent of the vocabulary here was to sound adult. It even works to a degree – anyone unable to translate the story will probably assume the problem is on their end and consider it good.
But anyone who likes to read stories with a high level of vocabulary will be disappointed. When reading complex sentences, there's a beautiful moment when the whole thing suddenly clicks into place and you understand both the sentence and the perfection of its phrasing. But when you go through all that trouble and there's no click? Annoyance, nothing more.
(For those interested in an example of complex sentences that still make sense, please allow me to direct you here. There are several other stories and poems that can be read there, as well as some rather interesting articles.)
Finality is a short story that's actually rather clever. The plot and the story's narrative structure are both good. There's a little kid standing around telling strangers that everyone will die.
The problems, sadly, are threefold, and they all tie back to vocabulary.
The first, interestingly, can be seen as early on as the summary. "We're all going to die." Yep, that's the words of a queer blonde haired kid with unusual blue eyes with a distinctive aura. Too bad it's true.
Now, how many of you, dear readers, see a mistake there? And how many don't but do, now that I mention it, sense something amiss?
They're rather minor errors – 'that' is a singular indefinite pronoun, and it's tied to the plural noun 'words'. There's also the problem of the double 'with' ("queer blonde haired kid with unusual blue eyes and a distinctive aura" would work, as would just dropping 'unusual blue eyes'). Along the same lines, you may notice how the vocabulary in the three sentences jumps from back and forth between formal and informal - yep is very informal, seen only in speech, while the description is something you'd expect to read as formal narration in a story, not hear. Finally, blonde is actually the feminine form of blond – and the kid happens to be a boy.
Why do I mention this? Because it highlights the problem – LilyPichu may have good ideas, but she just does not know how to get them down properly. Yes, they're minor, but there are four different problems in just three sentences.
The first paragraph (coming after the same line of dialogue shown in the summary) is:
The spoken words might have had a touch of amusement to it. Or perhaps a bold and audacious serious nature. But words were words. I had heard the little boy say it deliberately to a stranger, almost slowly. Like a trance. Or maybe merely mesmerizing curious and startled people with his chaste and virtuous behavior. However more, his brilliant cobalt eyes sparkled with a melancholy note. Or was it mischief? Frowning upon this incoherent statement, I had the nerves to walk up to the little boy repeating the same sentence.
This is just a single paragraph, but there's a lot questionable about it.
Firstly, you may notice that the sentences are choppy, incomplete. Although I don't believe sentence fragments are always wrong, they have to be used deliberately, and they need to sound better broken up then they would together. If you just drop a period in between a complete sentence, that's a problem.
The spoken words might have had a touch of amusement to it, or perhaps a bold and audacious serious nature.
There. This is less choppy. The feeling I get from story is a rather languid one, and choppy sentences don't fit that at all. Sentence fragments are typically used to indicate a half stop or restatement. (It didn't happen. Couldn't have.) If you're merely continuing an existing sentence, they don't work.
Now, notice the phrase "bold and audacious serious nature". Bold and audacious are synonyms. Although there are situations where listing two synonyms is acceptable, typically, they aren't linked usually with 'and'. (It was a dark, black night vs It was a dark and black night) Typically, pairing two synonyms together is also done for emphasis, and here that doesn't seem to be the case. The third dangling adjective 'serious' seems misplaced – what does it have to do with being bold and audacious? Interestingly, 'audacious' has the connotation that mildly contradicts 'serious' – it may refer to someone being foolhardy, overconfident, 'rushing in where angels fear to tread' and all that.
Also, this phrase is actually referring to the words. How can the words both sound like they have a 'touch of amusement' and a 'bold and audacious serious nature'? For that matter, why do the words *have* a nature? LilyPichu may have meant that the words showed the nature of the speaker, but that's not what the sentence says. Misattribution is a recurrent problem in this. At any rate, one typically wouldn't think amusement and seriousness would sound the same.
A third thing to notice is simply the sentence structure. Note the author's use of 'and' itself as a way of getting more adjectives into a sentence. This is a repeated device in her stories, as you'll see again by the fifth sentence.
Continuing, we see the sentence fragment "Like a trance." What is like a trance? Apparently, the *way* the boy is speaking. However, this isn't the correct use of the word. A trance is not a thing in and of itself, it's a state something else is in. What LilyPichu is trying to tell the reader is it was 'like he was in a trance' – but she doesn't know how to use the word, so the reader is left to add in the necessary other words themself.
Or maybe merely mesmerizing curious and startled people with his chaste and virtuous behavior. Here's a resurgence of the 'this and that' format the author uses. In the case of "curious and startled", the words don't seem to fit together – typically curiosity involves being interested in seeing more of something, while being startled means being surprised by something you weren't aware of. Also, the people are probably being startled by the boy, rather than the boy going up to people who are already startled. "Chaste and virtuous", on the other hand, do work fine paired together – my problem with this is that I'd sort of hope a little boy is chaste, seeing as being unchaste typically have a very strong sexual connotation (Chaste is typically used in connection with girls, much like virginal. It's also typically not used in connection to innocent childhood *behavior* but is more a state.) And is going around and telling people everyone's going to die really that chaste and virtuous?
The last sentence foreshadows a problem with the rest of the story. "Frowning upon this incoherent statement, I had the nerves to walk up to the little boy repeating the same sentence." To start, the previous sentence was neither a statement or incoherent, it was an uncertain observation where the narrator is unsure of how to interpret the boy's actions. If we're going to use technical language, let's get it right. Now, the narrator claims to "[have] the nerves," to walk up to the boy. Although the mental image I get from this of someone gathering up their many nerves into a bundle is amusing, when speaking about 'nerve', it's always singular. Nerve also means either courage or impudence, neither of which fit into the context. Next, notice that the last half of the sentence is in itself a repeat of what we've already been told, "…the little boy repeating the same sentence." This actually goes back to what I was mentioning about reusing description in Desiring a Friend. There is only one boy, and it's already been established he's saying this stuff to the adults around him. 'Repeating the same sentence' is also poorly placed. Did the narrator walk up while repeating the same sentence, or is 'repeating the same sentence' part of the boy's description? The reader can work it out from context, but a simple 'who was' would fix the problem.
All that about the first paragraph. You can see why this it lj-cut, huh?
His eyes were surprisingly penetrating, yet with the hint of beauty. Here, the adjectives are all being used properly. There's only one problem. LilyPichu uses 'yet' instead of 'and'. 'Yet' is used when the second idea contains something that would typically not be thought of in connection with the first. (The wall was rough-hewn, yet there were small patches of smoothness in the stone vs The wall was polished, yet it was smooth.) This is, yes, a rather minor thing, and it's easy to do. But add up enough minor problems and you wind up with a story that's both hard and unpleasant to read.
Was he kidding or was this perhaps a mischievous and cruel joke to strangers? There is, again, a subtle problem here. Mischievous typically means playful and without intentional cruelty. Sometimes (mischievous imps) it can mean playful and cruel, although this connotation is dying off. Either way, mischievous already has cruel in its meaning. So the sentence reads "perhaps a playful and cruel and cruel joke" or "perhaps a playful and not cruel and cruel joke". This is the author's love of using 'and' to pile on adjectives, and it leads to these sorts of problems.
thought I saw a glint of tears reflecting against his cerulean eyes before he turned away from me. They sparkled effectively, sorrowfully watching the people walk rapidly by. Here's another example of the misattribution. The tears are not sorrowfully watching people walk. The author's description here, while overly flowery, would work if she was more careful not to have the description link to the wrong thing.
We must have been pretty obscured, for no one had noticed a little blonde boy crying and a tall shabby figure next to him. One can only be obscured by something you see. The author's usage of the word suggests she doesn't actually know the meaning. Based on the story so far, 'obscured by' doesn't even fit, since the author keeps mentioning how they're in the middle of a crowd and no one pays attention.
I sighed, such a prerequisite action of me required to speak with a smooth tongue. This translates to "…such a requirement action of me required to speak…" which is not only redundant, but, like obscured, is just not how the word is used. I mentally reworded this as 'an action I needed to do in order to', which may have been what the author intended, but I can't be sure.
And I thought it had work as the little boy let out a high pitched and almost congenial laugh. I'll ignore simple grammatical error this time and just assume you can all see it. Here, synonym switching works fine – congenial means friendly. The problem is congenial's connotation. Congenial is a work that refers to friendly people like you, typically in a group of more than one. A social unit. Visualize a big Christmas party like one out of the flashbacks in A Christmas Carol, with a bunch of adults laughing and getting drunk. You could describe the laughter of one of the men there as congenial.
Connotation is probably the biggest problem with vocabulary I see. I recall reading the vocabulary sentence "The boy's leg was badly maimed so he couldn't walk for a year" on a poster at school, next to a picture of a boy with a cast on his leg. The kid who made it had read that 'maimed' meant injured and used it as such, unaware of the connotation of mangled and permanently disfigured. Misusing words has a ripple affect – someone else will read your misuse and pick up the wrong connotation, start using it like that, and someone else will read that…this is why it's so important to be sure you use the word correctly from the start.
The final sentence I'll point out is "It was such a tenacious speed of thought, but my adamant nature clung onto the concept." Kudos to anyone who can figure out exactly what's wrong there without me pointing it out.
And now, as a general comment over the whole of this story – it is being narrated entirely from the perspective of a single unnamed character, described as 'shabby'. Is the character honestly thinking in such a flowery overdescribed manner? This is told entirely in first person. In this case, authors should always keep in mind the character's vocabulary and personal way of phrasing things. I doubt anyone, ever, has actually thought like this. Unless they're carrying around a thesaurus and flipping through it as they go (which, come to think of it, would actually be rather interesting), I don't think they'd be using such obscure vocabulary so regularly. In the case of a first person narrator, an author should either construct an idea of how the character might talk and think, or if that's not possible (it is rather hard) they should try to use their own way of describing things and just try to avoid anything especially unfitting. This way, the narration will at least sound like an actual person.
So again. The story has an interesting idea, and that's probably the best thing about it. The way the story is told (as opposed to the word choice) is good. The description, once you translate it and if you ignore grammatical problems, is nothing impressive, but it's not outright bad. Decent, even. Unfortunately, in order to read the story you have to get through unnecessary and misused words, and this ruins it.
Now, it's pretty obvious the intent of the vocabulary here was to sound adult. It even works to a degree – anyone unable to translate the story will probably assume the problem is on their end and consider it good.
But anyone who likes to read stories with a high level of vocabulary will be disappointed. When reading complex sentences, there's a beautiful moment when the whole thing suddenly clicks into place and you understand both the sentence and the perfection of its phrasing. But when you go through all that trouble and there's no click? Annoyance, nothing more.
(For those interested in an example of complex sentences that still make sense, please allow me to direct you here. There are several other stories and poems that can be read there, as well as some rather interesting articles.)
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Re: How amusing...
Date: 2004-12-13 12:21 am (UTC)For crying out loud; I GET IT. If farla thinks it's worse than she thought, then okay. If you, keleri, a person I don't even know, think it's bad, I GET IT. 'Demonstrating?' Hah. So my writing's an example and an experiment to you? Looks like it. -_-
Tenth grade? Too bad I'm stuck in eighth for now~