We begin today with a shameless plug for a writer/director friend of mine’s film, out today in New York: Roland Tec’s WE PEDAL UPHILL. For those of you who live within driving distance of Cinema Village (where the film opens TODAY, incidentally) yet weren’t sufficiently blows away by the glowing New York Times Review, here’s the blurb:
One man drives an entire day to thank another for rescuing his family from the floodwaters of Katrina. A secretary to an election official must decide whether to bend the truth or lose her job. A PR handler scours the Redwood forest for the perfect spot for a presidential photo op. A mother watches silently from the window as her gay teenage son runs away from home in the middle of the night. These are just some of the characters brought to life with humor and empathy in Roland Tec’s tapestry of post-9/11 America. The thirteen stories that fill the landscape of We Pedal Uphill offer an intimate portrait of those who either stood bravely against the tide of fear or found themselves helplessly swept up in it..
If you happen to be anywhere near Greenwich Village within the next week, would you do me a favor and drop by to see it? I was supposed to be in NYC for the opening, but my doctors vetoed it, due to my latest hacking cough. Never mind that I’ve known Roland since he was a pup, or that I broke all land-speed records to make it to the San Francisco premiere of his first film, ALL THE RAGE: all that matters, apparently, is my not getting pneumonia again.
I suspect that doctor characters in my next three novels are going to be rather unpleasant characters. I really would have liked to see it hot off the presses, so to speak. I believe that the film is going to be coming out to my neck of the woods on its way around the art-house circuit, but it’s not quite the same, is it?
Okay, that’s enough about me for one day. Let’s talk about you: are your fingers still stained with highlighter ink, readers?
If they are, I’m proud of you: last time, I urged you to scan your submission pages (in particular, the first five, or all of a contest submission) for over-use of the words and, but, and then. Because the average manuscript submission is positively peppered with ‘em, I suggested that you print out these pages and highlight these words throughout, so that you might get a sense of just how often you tend to utilize them.
Well marked-up hands are thus today’s infallible indicator of Revisionist Virtue. Well done, messy-handed ones.
Of course, I assume that not all of you leapt right in and did it, or that still others of you started the task and gave up three buts into the task. “What was Anne thinking,” I heard some of you muttering, “to advise such a time-consuming (and potentially ink-consuming) exercise? Doesn’t she realize that a writer’s time is valuable?”
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do — which is precisely why I’m advising your investing a little time now in exchange for not having masses of your time wasted later by submissions that push Millicent the agency screener’s rejection buttons.
Why focus on conjunctions in particular, you ask? Well, quick-reading agency screeners, editorial assistants (who screen submissions for editors) and contest judges are routinely ordered to subtract points (Brownie in the case of the former two, literal in the case of the contest submission) for grammatical errors — and word repetition is always high on their penalty list.
As is that habitual roommate of conjunctions, the run-on sentence. Not sure what one looks like? Here’s a lulu:
Unsatisfied with Antoinette’s response, Guillermo withdrew his sword then wiped it disdainfully back and forth across his pantaloons to remove the blood and the gristle without bothering either to sheath it or thrust again afterward, because he would only need to draw it again if Claude turned out to be alive still and Antoinette wasn’t worth it in any case, but still, something about her facial expression, awed no doubt at his virile violence on her behalf but still feminine in its modesty, caused him to reconsider her earlier response, because mightn’t her apparent shock indicate mere innocent-bystanderish surprise and maidenly horror at what now seemed likely to have been his all-too-precipitate assumption that simply because Claude was in Antoinette’s drawing-room at half-past four in the afternoon and unaccompanied by a duenna or chaperone of any sort, he must perforce have been on the cusp of forcing himself upon her, although in retrospect, that seemed unlikely, since Claude had been cradling a cup of delicately-scented tea, eighteen smallish chocolate cakes, and a lap dog on the chintz couch — now covered in the sanguinary evidence of what now seemed a slight error of judgment, as well as quite a bit of chocolate frosting and Lhasa apso fur — whilst Antoinette was playing the spinet, the gift of her redoubtable grandfather who first founded the steel mill and thus founded the family fortune, all the way across the room against the far wall, the one which gave pride of place to that copy of the Mona Lisa Antoinette’s great-uncle had commissioned some starving artist to make for him in Paris that he always claimed in later years was the original.
Laugh if you like, but would it astonish you to learn that this is SHORTER than some of the sentences my aged eyes have beheld in manuscripts? I’ve seen sentences that have dragged on for more than a page, and although I have apparently lived to tell about it, there’s really no legitimate justification for dragging the reader through such an epic.
Run-on sentences, much like the repetition of a favorite word or phrase, are seldom the result of well-thought-out and purposeful writerly strategy. (Or, if so, it’s poor strategy: “I know! I’ll bore my reader AND annoy Millicent by making her read the sentence twice in order to understand it!”) The vast majority of the time, writers stumble into the habit without really noticing.
Believe me, professional readers WILL notice — and reject accordingly.
Yet another great reason to read your manuscripts OUT LOUD, IN HARD COPY, and IN THEIR ENTIRETY before you submit them.
Hint: if you can’t say any given sentence within a single breath, it might be a run-on. Another tip-off: where run-ons gather, there will be ands aplenty also, typically.
So take up your marked pages, please, and let’s observe the reproduction habits of and.
If you’re like most writers, your marking project probably revealed two major patterns of usage: in lists and in the HUGELY popular X happened and then Y happened structure. See if you can spot instances of both here:
Abe took a deep breath and ran his palms over his face. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the red and black tattoo over his left eyebrow, folded it twice, and stuffed it back into his coat. Outwardly composed, he smiled and extended his hand to Emile.
How did you do? Admittedly, we’re looking for something a bit subtle here. Although the types of repetition used in this example may sound merely chatty when read out loud, they come across as structurally redundant on the page. Even minor word repetition can set editorial teeth on edge, because they — like other professional readers — are trained to zero in on redundancy.
To see how this orientation might affect how one reads, let’s look at this same paragraph with a screener’s heightened antennae:
Abe took a deep breath and ran his palms over his face. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the red and black tattoo over his left eyebrow, folded it twice, and stuffed it back into his coat. Outwardly composed, he smiled and extended his hand to Emile.
See? The repetition of all those ands can be downright hypnotic — the percussive repetition lulls the reader, even if the action being described on either end of the and is very exciting indeed.
There’s a technical reason for that, you know, and if you’ve been paying attention throughout this series, it has probably already occurred to you: the swiftly-scanning eye’s automatic tendency is to jump between repeated words on a page, in very much the manner that a CLUE player might move his piece from the study to the kitchen via the secret passage about which everyone in the game is evidently quite well-informed. (Hey, it’s an editor’s job to demand precise word usage.)
The result: Miss Scarlet did it in the kitchen with the revolver.
Oops, wrong chain of events: the result relevant to us is a submission page read far, far more quickly than any of us might wish. Not only by Millicent and her ilk, but by the average reader as well.
The best way to avoid triggering this skimming reaction is to vary your sentence structure. A great place to start: keep an eye out for any sentence in which the word and appears more than once. As in:
Ezekiel put on his cocked hat, his coat of many colors, and his pink and black checked pantaloons. And he dusted himself out before heading toward the big top, clown shoes a-flopping.
Did your eye catch the subtle problem here? No? Take a gander at it as Millicent would see it:
Ezekiel put on his cocked hat, his coat of many colors, and his pink and black checked pantaloons. And he dusted himself out before heading toward the big top, clown shoes a-flopping.
All of the ands are serving slightly different functions here, two of which would be perfectly valid if they stood alone: the first is connecting the second and third items in a list; the second is connecting two characteristics in a shorter list. And the third — as in this sentence — is the kind of usage I discussed yesterday, where a conjunction gives a false sense of chatty consecutiveness between the first sentence and the second.
When I first began writing that last paragraph, I didn’t intend it to be an illustration of just how visually confusing word repetition may be on the page — but as I seemed to be succeeding brilliantly at doing just that, I figured I’d just run with it.
You’re welcome. Let’s highlight the repetition here, to determine precisely why a skimming reader might find it confusing:
All of the ands are serving slightly different functions here, two of which would be perfectly legitimate if they stood alone: the first is connecting the second and third items in a list; the second is connecting two characteristics in a shorter list. And the third — as in this sentence — is the kind of usage I discussed yesterday, where a conjunction gives a false sense of chatty consecutiveness between the first sentence and the second.
The twin revising morals:
(1) EVERY writer, no matter how experienced, will occasionally write a poorly-constructed sentence or paragraph, so there will NEVER be a point where any of us can legitimately assume that our first drafts require no revision whatsoever, and
(2) Just because a given word may carry more than one meaning — or, as here, refer to distinct categories of things — that fact doesn’t nullify the effects of repetition.
Because we writers tend to think of words according to their respective functions within any given sentence, rather than as images on a page, this kind of repetition often flies under our self-editing radars. Unless one is looking for it specifically, it’s easy to overlook.
Thus the highlighting pens, in case you were wondering. I’m just trying to make that repetition jump out at you.
Incidentally, words that sound alike but are spelled differently — there, they’re, and their, for instance — often strike readers as repetitious if they are used in too close proximity to one another. As in:
“They’re going to look for their zithers in there,” Thierry pointed out.
Why might this sentence give a reader pause? Because many pronounce silently in their heads while they scan.
Particularly with names, I’ve noticed. As we discussed last week, the screenwriters’ axiom of avoiding christening characters with names that begin with the same letter — since skimming eyes zero in on capital letters, readers are likely to confuse Darren, Dirk, and Denise — makes perfect sense. However, names that sound similar can produce a similar effect.
Change ‘em so they don’t sound so much alike. Millicent will thank you — and, having survived editing a manuscript whose characters were Maureen, Marlene, Doreen, Arleen, and Darlene, I will thank you, too.
Next time, I shall delve into some other problems that commonly arise from an over-reliance upon ands. In the meantime, in between time, try to minimize word and sentence structure repetition, and keep up the good work!