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Which small, lazy words do you hate most?
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I listened to an audiobook of Brad Meltzer and noticed that his characters "blurted" up to twice per page. I almost wrote him to alert him, since someone gave me his email address a long time ago, but I think I was wiser to hold off.Of course, I began to use "blurted" myself, but much more sparingly. 2-3 per novel. Ironic, right?
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"What?"
"I was speaking Danish."
[LAUGHS]
Smirk.I can't stand that word. There is never a legitimate reason to use it.
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One of those words is tautological.
Ah. I just died a little, reading that.
What kills me is: "shrugged his shoulders".What would he shrug, his hips?
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As a reader, an overuse of and, the, but. I don't mind a word that is used a few times on one page but the writing would have to be pretty damn good to overlook an overuse of a word.
Another word I positively detest is like. As in Like, you know I did like so and so and like dude he was freaking brilliant and like it was soooo good. It's juvenlie and pathetic at best.
Textspeak. LOL, ROFLMAO, WTH, WTF (that one is even creeping into mainstream media as a proper word), L8, BRB....
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Of course, it would be a crime if some of the crap we see today survives, but it won't.
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Maybe. But I'm a survivor of umpteen new technologies, each with its own insider-speak that was said to be the language of the future, and of as many so-called 'social revolutions", each with its own hip vocabulary, and they're all dust, and what remains is standard English.
Who now speaks like the characters in Orange Clockwork? You can all multiply examples.
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Textspeak is destroying (has destroyed) the younger generation's ability to write. And read. I think that devolution is one of the main reasons why we see so many poorly written books do so well. It doesn't matter anymore if a book is poorly written; a great deal of the audience is not put-off by mediocre communication because it's how they communicate.Hz u hrd new Bieber song? Wckd kwl. K, l8trz, peeps.
Etc, etc, ad nauseum. I guess the transmittal of (vague) meaning is the only important thing. The quality of the transmitting medium is irrelevant.
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Younger generations are just far too comfortable with how everything is currently lived online and how shortcuts are easier to take than to actually work at something.
I also think that the way we educate our children speaks volumes for how they no longer seem able to read properly. The alphabet is ignored in favour of sounding out words phonetically. Spelling is important, but not as it was even 10 or 15 years ago.
And Bieber Fever needs to die. Now. Forever. Little twerp.
Your shortcuts comment is a good way to distill one of the main components of the problem. Hard work is looked down upon by the younger folks. I'm afraid they're in for a rude awakening, particularly with how shaky the world economy is getting.Bieber is such an inexplicable phenomenon. People like him (well, young people in general) are not capable of self-editing.
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On the other hand, with particular reference to books, in which writing long good books is much harder work than writing short good books, it strikes me as a hopeful sign that Mark Coker of Smashwords deduces from his records ample evidence that longer books sell better. There are readers who appreciate a good long story and are willing to work at it, to sink into it. And that is in the face of a trend for indie "books" at least to become much shorter.
Sometimes data isn't enough. Sometimes it's the analysis.In this, unfortunately, it's somewhat lacking.
Although I appreciate that Coker was trying to do, his statistical analysis of the data is rather lacking in a number of ways both in how he's presented it and how he's analyzed it mathematically. Some of the things he's done are not just inappropriate (using averages of a power curve for example) because they will lead to misleading conclusions.
Sure, it's better than nothing, but, from a statistical standpoint, his conclusions and deductions aren't supported at all, and his graphs are often misleading.
Now to be clear, I am NOT saying that Mark was trying to be shady or anything. I just don't think his background is such that he's actually had any training or deep experience with actual statistical analysis. He's made a lot of real rookie-style flaws in the analysis, and I say this as someone with only a marginal biostatistics background and not someone with a real hard-core stats background.
If I were had to have done some of the stuff Mark's done with this graph and submitted it to my thesis committee, they would kicked it back without blinking.
His conclusions are flawed at best, and without someone with a bit more in a background in this thing needs to look at his raw data (can't even tell certain things from the graph because the way he's grouped it, his ranges he's chosen, et cetera).
Again, not saying Mark was trying to be purposefully be misleading, I just don't think he quite knows how to handle this sort of data appropriately.
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I noticed some of what Jeremy says the first time I saw Coker's data, but didn't have much time to give it and decided it wasn't worth mentioning, as long as I was only looking for an overall trend rather than clockwork internal analysis.
It may be worth the time, if we ever go deeper into Coker's published conclusions (i.e. mine down to subsidiary conclusions depending on more fractional data), to make a list of what Coker didn't do with statistical punctilio, and to make allowances accordingly.
But meanwhile I think we can take a conclusion from the whole of the data set, that longer volumes sell better, as read, as long as we don't accept the number on the graph as fixed to any nearer than, say, 20%.
Will you go with that, Jeremy?
We could probably between us offer to do the next analysis for him, and do a somewhat better job, but it would be time-consuming, and time is the one thing I have least of.
I'll just note that I think Mark should anonymize the data and hand it over to someone who knows what they are doing. He doesn't have to, of course, it's his data, but otherwise it's just a curiosity.Plus, he shouldn't make conclusions about formats he doesn't even allow (e.g., serials). Even in the most charitable interpretation of his data, that's just wacky.
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Thing with data is that it's power. Anyone who controls the data is seen to have access, which is really the business Smashwords is in. People with data, even when it is anonymized, don't like giving it into anyone else's hands.
That's very true, in all realms, I suppose. At one point, I was advised specifically to not give a presentation at a conference until right before I was ready to publish lest another lab that was slightly more agile (i.e., had more money) take my ideas and run them to completion faster.
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Wont. I hate that word. Not won't. Just wont.
"The gun fired off a bullet, as guns are wont to do."
If literary tears could be measured drop per drop, then the entire Earth would drown in less than a day, and it wouldn't dry up for 4,000 years.
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"The gun fired, as guns do."
Which small, lazy words do you hate most?
by Andre Jute » 04 Apr 2011 14:33
Which small, lazy words do you hate most? Sue McLarty, Cookie's Mom, famous on The Indie Spot and ROBUST as SJM, runs a book review blog, and invited me, among others, to be a guest blogger when she went on holiday. Note down your own choice of hateful, lazy words, and the names of authors who overuse them, before you check my choice:
http://cookiesbookclub.blogspot.com/2...
You might be surprised at what I've chosen!
If you've chosen the same as I have, you're a genius. and should instantly be cloned six-fold and installed in editorial chairs up and down high-rent New York real estate.