Edith Pawlicki's Blog - Posts Tagged "grammar"
Novels and Grammar
We have a delightful amount of snow - though felt like too much during the three hours it took to shovel our driveway!
I've been working on proofing recently, and it's given me a new appreciation for editing software.
I like to write in Google Docs because it makes it easy to work on my novel wherever and whenever I think of something. However, one I decided to self-publish my novels, I invested in Microsoft Office in order to create the paperback proofs. With Minerva (coming out February 2021, giveaway open now, I was pretty surprised that Word's editing software was suggesting nearly 2,000 errors as the book had been proofed pretty thoroughly. Many of course were "misspellings" of words I invented for the setting; there were also many places were there were two spaces that I couldn't see with my eyes. The remaining errors were mostly about compound words (I swear, every time I thought a word should have a hyphen, it was supposed to be joined and every time I joined it, it was supposed to be a hyphen!) and commas. I followed most of Word's suggestions, but I did dig my heels on on some of the commas, especially in dialogue where I may have inserted some to show the speaker was pausing or hesitant even though grammatically speaking no pause was expected.
Last night and this morning, I was doing the same thing for my fantasy novel, Vows of Gold and Laughter (coming April 2021). I have not done a line edit yet, so I wasn't surprised when Word suggested 2788 errors when I opened it, but names and places accounted for over 2000 errors. The remaining were mostly commas.
It made me realize how differently - and more loosely - I view grammar when trying to convey a character's point of view or voice versus an essay or nonfiction piece. I have a lot of sentences which might be called run-on for there are three complete sentences joined by conjunctions, and when I do this, I usually only put a come splitting the longest of the three from the shorter two. For example, "I was foolish and I'll explain, but do you think we can get out of here first?"
Word didn't complain about the run-on, but it wanted a comma after "foolish." I disagree - I feel like the first two sentences, while having separate subjects, are so tightly joined that we shouldn't put in a comma. I think I feel that way especially when both compounds are very short (less than four words perhaps). Word didn't object to the many sentence fragments I used for dramatic or emotional effect, but it did complain about the many, many times I did not put a comma after a adverb at the beginning of a sentence ("Finally his eyes came back to her, probing deep." "Surely by the time one passed twenty millennia, one should know oneself. ") Now the grammar rule here is a little softer - the Internet says that adverbs are often, usually followed by commas. And I do sometimes use commas - but sometimes I really feel there shouldn't be one! I'm a little surprised how strong my feelings are on the subject...
Do you usually follow software's grammatical suggestions or do you have strong opinions of your own (that might defy conventions like mine)?
I've been working on proofing recently, and it's given me a new appreciation for editing software.
I like to write in Google Docs because it makes it easy to work on my novel wherever and whenever I think of something. However, one I decided to self-publish my novels, I invested in Microsoft Office in order to create the paperback proofs. With Minerva (coming out February 2021, giveaway open now, I was pretty surprised that Word's editing software was suggesting nearly 2,000 errors as the book had been proofed pretty thoroughly. Many of course were "misspellings" of words I invented for the setting; there were also many places were there were two spaces that I couldn't see with my eyes. The remaining errors were mostly about compound words (I swear, every time I thought a word should have a hyphen, it was supposed to be joined and every time I joined it, it was supposed to be a hyphen!) and commas. I followed most of Word's suggestions, but I did dig my heels on on some of the commas, especially in dialogue where I may have inserted some to show the speaker was pausing or hesitant even though grammatically speaking no pause was expected.
Last night and this morning, I was doing the same thing for my fantasy novel, Vows of Gold and Laughter (coming April 2021). I have not done a line edit yet, so I wasn't surprised when Word suggested 2788 errors when I opened it, but names and places accounted for over 2000 errors. The remaining were mostly commas.
It made me realize how differently - and more loosely - I view grammar when trying to convey a character's point of view or voice versus an essay or nonfiction piece. I have a lot of sentences which might be called run-on for there are three complete sentences joined by conjunctions, and when I do this, I usually only put a come splitting the longest of the three from the shorter two. For example, "I was foolish and I'll explain, but do you think we can get out of here first?"
Word didn't complain about the run-on, but it wanted a comma after "foolish." I disagree - I feel like the first two sentences, while having separate subjects, are so tightly joined that we shouldn't put in a comma. I think I feel that way especially when both compounds are very short (less than four words perhaps). Word didn't object to the many sentence fragments I used for dramatic or emotional effect, but it did complain about the many, many times I did not put a comma after a adverb at the beginning of a sentence ("Finally his eyes came back to her, probing deep." "Surely by the time one passed twenty millennia, one should know oneself. ") Now the grammar rule here is a little softer - the Internet says that adverbs are often, usually followed by commas. And I do sometimes use commas - but sometimes I really feel there shouldn't be one! I'm a little surprised how strong my feelings are on the subject...
Do you usually follow software's grammatical suggestions or do you have strong opinions of your own (that might defy conventions like mine)?
