Bad Habits?

[wildsweetone]

Hiya Lou, long time no see! Hope you and yours are all doing okay. Please say hi to hubby.

Bad habits? I have too many to name.

The worst habit at the moment is making me write great grammatical English with wonderful punctuation sprinkled amongst stilted, crappy writing.

The course work is driving me nuts. I think I need to write another Litland story to kick the mental barriers out of the way. lol

Another one... though. I write 'though' way too many times and have to hunt the little blighter out with the find function and exorcise it!

 

[Black Tulip]

Speaking for myself, there's one bad habit that's annoying above all others. Noticing it once, you'll never forget it. Settling into your mind, it'll never leave you alone. Having caught it, you won't easily get rid of it.

Yes, it's rampant paricipial phrase-itis. It drives me nuts. Sometimes I think it must be the second sentence structure people learn, right after the simple declarative Subject-verb-object type. Reading a story that has a lot of leading phrases like this, I grow anguished. Trying to shut my eyes, it only gets worse. Getting up from the computer, I stagger across the room...

Which brings to mind bad habit #2: ellipsismania! You know... Where they use that thing... That ellipsis... Instead of a period... Or a comma... Or anything... ... ......

---dr.M. ...

LOL

Reading this I am reminded of my very first story. I asked for feedback and there was this dr. or something who said I shouldn't start every sentence the same way. Trying to remember his name.

Having committed the advice to memory I try avoiding that construction ever since.

 

[shereads]

Ok, I confess.

I write onomatopoetic dialouge.

Liar, you sicko!
What's next for you? Beastiality stories? Pedophilia?

Liar, I'm with you on onomatopoeia. It brings a lot to a story when it's used well. Your example is one that works, and you couldn't have expressed the same moment any other way.

"No," she said adamantly, stretching out the word in an exaggerated fashion.

There are people who'll never make it work, and typically they type: "I'm cummmmmmmmmmmmingggggggg."

Maybe the test should be whether you could read it aloud. If I were reading a bedtime story to George Clooney, I could certainly read, "Noooo!!" But "cummmmmmingggggggg" would make me sound like a choking victim. Clooney would call an ambulance, and our evening would be ruined.

 

[shereads]

I've got so many bad habits, I am now a hopeless case... a lost cause... no way back. (See what I mean)

I'm told I write as I speak... which I'm also told is wrong.

Shit I speak English... what the fuck else can I write.

I personally don't give a damn about 'proper' written English, if it's readable and doesn't detract from the subject... good enough for me... It was good enough for Shakespeare.

pops............. (The illiterate one)

I love reading you and EL for the same reason: I can "hear" your voices on the page. Reading pop_54, I feel like I'm sitting at a table full of your friends in a pub someplace, hearing you tell tales. I can even hear the group's reaction. I know when the others at the table are laughing, when they're listening quietly, and when a couple of the guys excuse themselves to, uh, use the restroom.

I've never been in an English pub, but I have a vivid image of the one where I listen to your stories. It's a bit dark inside at all times, even in the middle of the day. There's a thick layer of varnish on the tables, and some cigarette burns. There's a couple in the kitchen who argue a lot, and sometimes she throws pots and pans at him. When that happens, you talk louder to be heard over the racket.

Can you imagine how boring this site would be if every story was written according to The Elements of Style?

 

[Liar]

Liar, you sicko!
What's next for you? Beastiality stories? Pedophilia?

I was thinking I could combine...

A story about two bearcubs getting it on?

#L

 

[shereads]

Two 18-year-old bearcubs would be acceptable, I suppose. As long as one of them isn't cummmmmingggggggg.

(See edit above.)

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Have written lines like this:
"Wh...uh...whatthefuck? Noooo way! Nononono no that, is just...so...wrong."

I don't even have the common sense to see what is wrong with that. I've heard people condemn this way of writing speech, you know, the way some people actually talk. So far I haven't heard a good explanation why though.

#L

I don't see anything especially wrong with that. It's a little comic-bookish, but that's not necessarily bad. Anyhow, I have a lot of tolerance for whatever's in quotation marks, and your ellipses here aren't standard ellipses. They're pause marks.

The standard ellipsis comes at the end of a statement to show that the statement was cut off or trailed off without completion.

The murderer was...

I've read stories here where almost every sentence ends in an ellipsis.

She took off her blouse and lay back waiting... He got up and came towards her... Their lips met in a passionate kiss...

I mean, like finish the damned thought already!

---dr.M.

 

[Linbido]

[BThere are people who'll never make it work, and typically they type: "I'm cummmmmmmmmmmmingggggggg."

Maybe the test should be whether you could read it aloud. If I were reading a bedtime story to George Clooney, I could certainly read, "Noooo!!" But "cummmmmmingggggggg" would make me sound like a choking victim. Clooney would call an ambulance, and our evening would be ruined. [/B]

The biggest problem, apart from the tackyness of it all, is that people actually try to stretch short consonants. Which is something that is sikmply not done. When I read "I'm cummmmmmmmmmmmingggggggg." m I think of someone who starts to stutter out a string of g's. There is something to be said about g-strings (oh, please kill me), and maybe it's a 'speech impediment due to throes of exstacy' thing. But it's just silly, if you ask me.

 

[shereads]

There is something to be said about g-strings (oh, please kill me)

Well...okay. But reluctantly, because I've never killed anyone and I didn't want to start over a bad pun in a thread on a message board at a porn site.

But hey, it's your life.

Before I kill you, I think the g-stringers might be victims of schools that taught reading based on whole-word recognition. Anybody who came up during the Fun with Phonics era would remember to "sound it out."

You cannot sound it out the word, "cummmmmmmmingggggggg." But you can certainly sound out, "Noooooo!" Which, as any student of The Bodice Ripper novel will know, is shorthand for "No, no, a thousand times no!"

 

[sweetnpetite]

I don't like them in fiction either.

Sometimes if they are used judiciously, they are ok.

Same thing with exclamation points. Most times they just bug the hell out of me. There better not be more than one in a story- and then only if you really really *really* need it!

(unnecessary parentasies, and exclamation point- oh well! )

Interesting thread and well worth the time to read through. I'm happy enough with most of mine, although I can write ridiculously long sentences at times. Somewhere, in one of my pieces, is a one hundred and fifty word sentence. Deliberately that long, because of what I was trying to convey. I sometimes use parenthetical phrases, separated either by dashes or commas, and that brings me to the point of this rambling missive.

One thing I hate to see in a piece of fiction is a parenthetical phrase actually in parentheses. It always brings my voluntary suspension of reality to a halt, because it just looks plain wrong in a piece of fiction.

Am I being stupidly sensitive?

Alex

 

[Guest]

My biggest habit is using the word "that" when it isn't needed. I do it way too much.

 

[Guest]

Hiya Lou, long time no see! Hope you and yours are all doing okay. Please say hi to hubby.

Bad habits? I have too many to name.

The worst habit at the moment is making me write great grammatical English with wonderful punctuation sprinkled amongst stilted, crappy writing.

The course work is driving me nuts. I think I need to write another Litland story to kick the mental barriers out of the way. lol

Another one... though. I write 'though' way too many times and have to hunt the little blighter out with the find function and exorcise it!

Hi WSO!

Good to see you. How you doing?

I think you make a very good point there. I know when I try to write precise and acurate, grammatically correct English my writing becomes stilted and lacking in flow. My grasp of grammar is pretty good, as in I know what "sounds" right, and I just write what I think does sound write. This may not always be spot on, grammar wise, but sod Word and its green squiggly lines, if I want to write fragments that I should consider revising, I will!

I used to have a problem with writing "though" to much and "that" (as Crimson said), and other redundancies, but I had this pointed out to me once and now I'm pretty strict with those.

Lou

 

[Linbido]

I have one bad habit that makes my other ones look pretty pale: I don't fucking write enough.

 

[Guest]

I have one bad habit that makes my other ones look pretty pale: I don't fucking write enough.

You are so right about that, Lin!

Lou

 

[oggbashan]

I have one bad habit that makes my other ones look pretty pale: I don't fucking write enough.

True, Linbido, but you have years ahead of you to make up for slow output - and you are worth waiting for.

Me? I write too much. Some of it fails and yet I still leave it posted. 74 stories, one pending and three figures of incomplete ones to finish.

Og

 

[Bizkit_Writer]

writing habits? oy I have a few I know I am horrible with not using description in my stories. I try but damn my fingers don't want to type the words I'm thinking. AGH!

 

[Guest]

writing habits? oy I have a few I know I am horrible with not using description in my stories. I try but damn my fingers don't want to type the words I'm thinking. AGH!

You have my sympathies. My damn fingers sometimes type something completely on a tangent, it changes the whole direction of a story.

Lou

 

[Bizkit_Writer]

You have my sympathies. My damn fingers sometimes type something completely on a tangent, it changes the whole direction of a story.

Lou

Sure does! Thanks lou