Ten Writing No-No's

For years, reviewing has been a sort of passion of mine. I love reading other people’s works, I love ripping them apart, and I especially love it when someone does that for me in return. But after reading around five hundred works on WDC alone – this doesn’t include my other writing sites – I noticed some odd, recurring trends.

As my second birthday on WDC approaches, I came up with the brilliant, twisted idea to compile a list of the top ten most common writing mistakes I see while in-depth reviewing. Now, in no way is this list inclusive, nor is it official, and half of you will probably disagree and give me 1.0 ratings because you do numbers one, four, six, and nine…but hey, maybe we can all learn something from it.

Emerin’s List of No-No’s

No-No Number Ten: (Parentheses)


If you can believe it (hardly any people do), while browsing through WDC’s search engine (which, by the way, is fantastic), or perhaps picking up a couple pieces in various review forums (or maybe the Plug Page), I come upon lots of pieces (okay, maybe more than a lot, more like a million (but who’s counting?)) that for some odd reason feel the need to put adjectival and adverbial modifiers in parentheses when commas will suffice. I even see the egregious double parentheses, capable of ruining the most delectable prose. I love parentheses, too, but only when they’re used for chat-speak prettiness, like (((….::::~eMeRiN~::::….))). *

…which leads me to Number Nine.



No-No Number Nine: C|-|a7 sP3aK

u mah bff
n i u 4eva
bebe, ur no n00b

That is not a haiku, even if it somehow follows the 5-7-5 syllable count.

Please, please, please, type in normal English. I know after ten hours on instant messenger, that’s all your fingers will do; however, it looks unprofessional from a reviewer's perspective. So take a break off the IM, let your fingers rest a bit…and write things out. Yes, I know it’s your blog, your poem, your novel – but that doesn’t make chat-speak acceptable.

Rule of thumb: A good percentage of others on the site will NOT appreciate your writing, no matter how well written it is, if you insist on putting in numbers for syllables.



No-No Number Eight: !!!!!!!! ?!?!??!?!! ???????

I don’t care how excited your character is at riding his first unicorn, ten exclamation marks are not necessary. In fact, I don’t even think two are necessary. Just stick to the standard one. The same rule applies to question marks. Adding six or seven more question marks after the first one is cheap. If you want to display that you are especially questioning, do so with your words, not your punctuation.

Rule of thumb: Publishers don’t accept ?!, !!!!, and ???????, so if I see it, I will comment on it.



No-No Number Seven: :Colons:

Not that colons aren’t fun; they are useful for a variety of reasons. Like the parentheses, however, they are overused. If you’ve used more than four colons in a sentence, go back and take four of them out. Vary your sentence structure and use semicolons, em-dashes, and commas. They won’t bite, I promise!

Rule of thumb: Overusing any type of punctuation mark = bad.



No-No Number Six: Really Completely Annoyingly Unnecessary Modifiers

Not that we don’t appreciate that your Princess has golden flowing beautiful curly shining hair, but sometimes it gets to the point when there are so many modifiers that we forget them all. Plus it sounds childish.



No-No Number Five: I use semicolons; correctly, too!

Semicolons are used to connect two independent clauses. An independent clause is a group of words containing a subject and a verb and expressing a complete thought, and is also called a sentence. A good rule to follow is this: semicolons should replace a comma and a conjunction.

For example:

Sally walked home, but she felt sad.

Sally walked home; she felt sad.

The semicolon replaced the comma conjunction.

The common semicolon mistake is to substitute a semicolon for a comma right before a gerundial modifier.

Sally walked home; feeling sad. Don’t do that.

Rule of thumb: If there’s an –ing, there shouldn’t be a semicolon before it.



No-No Number Four: Unnecessary Passive Verbs

Now, articles upon books upon encyclopedias exist on this subject, so I won’t go too in-depth with it. I would, however, like to give some common examples.

This was given to me by Emerin. Bad.

Emerin gave it to me. Good!


The mouse was eaten by the owl. Bad.

The owl ate the mouse. Good!


I am made sad by the awkward sentences I am writing. Bad.

The awkward sentences I write make me sad. Good!



No-No Number Three: When you use a bunch, like more than it is completely necessary, to talk about something that isn’t really important

Wordiness! Verbosity! Really Bad Prose!

However you care to call it, it results in comprehensive difficulty, vagueness, and redundant language – basically, your writing becomes boring.

Rule of thumb: if you can say it in three words, say it in three. If you can say it in two, that’s even better.

Example:

I decided that the tree, which was definitely facing the pond, was more pleasing to me than that other tree that was standing on the side of the fence, which was painted white by somebody.

I like the tree facing the pond better than the tree near the white fence.


Oh, and before you laugh, go back and make sure I didn’t lift this sentence from a short story lurking inside the inner workings of your portfolio.



No-No Number Two: ‘What are you talking about”? she cried! I never misuse dialogue punctuation’.

Just get it right, please.

There are plenty of free resources available on the web, so look it up and use it correctly.

Purdue University has a wonderful grammatical site, with fantastic examples.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_quote.html

It’ll help you; I promise.

A couple rules of thumb:

1. The punctuation goes INSIDE the quotation marks.
2. Use double quotation marks instead of single quotation marks. Even if the single ones look cooler.

and finally…



No-No Number One: Speling

Atrocious spelling turns me off to a piece, and Microsoft Word has officially gotten rid of all excuses for it.

I dnot crae taht Haravrd Uiverntisy syas popele can sitll raed tihgns if the lsat and the frist ltertes saty the smae.

I can’t.


Rule of Thumb: If one can’t read it, one won’t like it!


*By no sense of the word do I condone “prettiness” in book titles and in-and-out posts and all that jazz. For those of you that have commented against it, just pretend there’s a really big NOT right after the multiple parentheses. Oh, and if you like that kind of thing, don’t read this.



Thank you for bearing with me, and I hope I have amused you at least once in the duration of this article. By no stretch of the imagination am I the perfect writer, and I would appreciate any input anyone can give me.

All grammatical suggestions in this article refer to American English. If you happen to be British, just ignore a couple of the No-No's and check out "Kiya's Big Book of Writing Guidelines"  by kiyasama.


Word Count: 1,239


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