Punctuating your story

[Tribade]

I've just had my second story, "Lady of the Night" accepted after rehashing the spelling and punctuation. I did as our editors advise, read the articles on how to punctuate, and I'm gradually and slowly getting the hang of it. The question I'd like to ask of my fellow writers is this. Have you looked at the way some professionally published books are being punctuated lately? I'm currently reading an almost 600 page sci fi novel by a best selling Brit author and found specimens like this.

"He gazed at her long-silky-thighs." Maybe this is some new printing technique I've not encountered before. This is a hard back edition so the columns of type on the page are about four and a half inches wide and I came across one sentence that occupied five or six lines and contained not a single punctuation mark. I read the sentence out aloud and found I was running out of breath near the end. It goes against what we're told to do with our writing I'm certain. Another book I've recently finished contained, as punctuation, ////.Slash marks on a computer keyboard used to punctuate puzzled me.Anybody maybe work in the printing or publishing industry? If you do,tell me if this is now becoming common practice. Everybody tell me anyway if you're getting confused like I am.

 

[christabelll]

Anymore, the typographical errors in stories are not being caught before they go to print.
I have seen it with some of the best authors I read.
The poor punctuation and such is fairly common... but with the advent of Computer editing a lot is not caught before it goes to print.
If you look at books written and edited prior to say - 1992 you will find far far far less grammatical errors.
If and when any of my books or stories go for "print" I will have edited it with computer and human eyes many times so it will be as close to perfect as can be managed.
It is jarring to see and 8, 9, 10 - 25 dollars book have glaring editorial errors...
I have even gone so far as to write the publishers and complain about it... If I am spending that kind of money I expect good copy. Its pretty much unacceptable for errors to be in printed books....

hehehehe

 

[christabelll]

I haven't gone and read it yet - just running through the boards right now -
however -
You need to copy the link and paste it here if you want any one to read it...
as they have said in many posts
Make it REALLY EASY - or they wont read it .....


I'll read it later when I don't have as much to do...

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

It's sort of like this -
If your name is Steven King and you sell 300,000 book per year, your publisher doesn't give a shit how you punctuate or spell.

On the other hand, the rest of us...

 

[Tribade]

Link to lady of the Night for criticism of any kind is.

http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=316826

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Lady of the night has a few problems. First thing is, this is a short piece, but at least five of your paragraphs are more than 10 screen lines long. That makes the story difficult to read. Keep your paragraphs down to 6 to 8 screen lines. Longer than that and it kills the eyes.

Your first paragraph

It's a mild night in April and I'm tucked into a deepish doorway outside the old, abandoned, brickyard. It's a bad night to look for customers, England are playing a European quarter final against Holland but fortunately not everyone likes football as much as sex. I hate being stereotyped and I just don't fit most people's picture of your average hooker. I've not got a habit, I've never done drugs, it's a mug's game. I'm not desperate to support my kids because I don't have any and there's no guy I'm besotted with to send me out to earn cash for him. Why do I do it then? I like sex and I get well paid for what I give my customers. I sort of slid into the life when I had a one night stand with a businessman who was overnighting in my home town, as I left his hotel room he slipped me a small roll of notes, guess he thought I was a professional. Later, when I lost my job, I decided I could live with this as a way to make a living. A risky job? Can be, but I am a big woman and I can look after myself. Dad was a marine and he took me and my sister to an ex- army mate of his who ran a dojo.

deepish? It's deep or it's not. Learn to be percise. The paragraph begins in present tense-singular, then you wrote, "It's a bad night to look for customers, England are playing a European quarter final against Holland but fortunately not everyone likes football as much as sex." which switches to present tense-multiple then back again. I believe it should be, "England is playing..." Over all the sentence is confused. You really should have placed a period after, "It's a bad night to look for customers" rather than a comma. Adding clause after clause is burdensome to read.

Throughout the paragraph you run-on your sentences with "and" clauses. You should mix it up a bit. It would make this more interesting to read.

Next in the paragraph you wrote -

I sort of slid into the life when I had a one night stand with a businessman who was overnighting in my home town, as I left his hotel room he slipped me a small roll of notes, guess he thought I was a professional.

This should be the beginning of a new paragraph and the comma after town should be a period to begin a new sentence. The final clause has no subject with the "I" understood. That too should be a separate sentence beginning with the "I".

The problem is, you are writing the way you talk. None of us speak correctly. That's the big difference between oral and written language.

Generally, you have a good plot. Your character development is a bit thin, but you will learn that in time. The best advice I can give you is find an editor to go over your stories before you submit them. This one was ruined by the grammar.

But don't feel bad. This story is at least as good as some of the best first timers I've read.

If you want to know more, just PM me.

JJ

 

[Varian P]

Anymore, the typographical errors in stories are not being caught before they go to print.

I've certainly noticed a bit of this, myself.

But I'm currently reading "Blindness," which won the Nobel for literature, and it does things like have five sentences of direct speech from five different speakers all jammed into a single paragraph, sometimes separated by commas, sometimes by periods, without a single quotation mark.

It's done consistently and repeatedly, and is clearly intentional. I gather it's done to put across the way human speech in groups is free-flowing and sometimes confusing. And once I got used to it, it wasn't terribly hard to parse. It's mainly disconcerting because it's so far from what we're used to, as readers, and trained to do, as writers.

As a chronic offender against proper grammar, I approve of authors taking liberties, when done with a purpose (to put across a feeling, to better convey how we experience language in real life, etc.).

But I get annoyed when it seems to be done just for the sake of breaking with convention. Someone's going to have to explain that //// thing to me before I see how it enhances a piece of literature, but I'll allow it's possible.

-V