Stupid grammer question

[XerXesXu]

I believe purple signifies greatness in some cultures. Perhaps purple sages. Add some finely-chopped red onion, some soft bread crumbs, and a beaten egg to make an excellent stuffing for chicken.

Don't forget Rosemary and Thyme. If Rosemary has the time for you, you can take stuffing to a new level

 

[KeithD]

I believe purple signifies greatness in some cultures. Perhaps purple sages. Add some finely-chopped red onion, some soft bread crumbs, and a beaten egg to make an excellent stuffing for chicken.

Or a colorful (colourful) omelet (omelette).

 

[SimonDoom]

But I'd be interested in you opinion on The Great Apostrophe Debate. Do you think it should be abolished as the great sages advise, since it signifies nothing and confuses children?

I don't know of any sages who advocate that.

The general rule is: add an apostrophe + s. The rule is simple. It's logical. And it tracks the way most people talk in spoken conversation (perhaps not you and some others -- but I think most people talk that way).

So I'm all for apostrophe plus s after singular nouns that end in "s."

I do enjoy sage in some foods, but rosemary and thyme are more versatile.

 

[Handley_Page]

I believe purple signifies greatness in some cultures.

The purple colour was the thing for Ceasar.
The reason was that it was Very Rare [it came from a little snail].

 

[SamScribble]

The purple colour was the thing for Ceasar.
The reason was that it was Very Rare [it came from a little snail].

I do hope that no snails were harmed in the making of this colour, HP

 

[Bramblethorn]

I do hope that no snails were harmed in the making of this colour, HP

I have bad news for you...

 

[johnnyysmith]

grammar is not my strong suit and recently I found an interesting article how to improve my english writing, it helped me a lot. I think it's ok to use some help of pro writers for grammar and plagiarism check. Thanks to these services I got good grade in English.

 

[SamScribble]

As a writer whose pen has paid the butcher, the baker, and the wine merchant for almost 60 years now, I find myself interested in descriptive grammar – how people actually use language as opposed to how the prescriptivists say people should use language.

And yet I find myself forever avoiding ending sentences with prepositions, and silently (and sometimes not-so-silently) correcting fewer and less, and I and me, and several other common ‘mistakes’. After all these years, Miss Coles still has much for which to answer. (I could have said 'to answer for', but Miss Coles would not have permitted that.)

 

[KeithD]

I do fewer/less and I/me, but I stopped worrying about putting a preposition at the end of a sentence--or splitting an infinitive when it seemed to sound better to do--decades ago. Sentence fragments don't bother me when used in fiction or effect either.

 

[ElectricBlue]

As a writer whose pen has paid the butcher, the baker, and the wine merchant for almost 60 years now, I find myself interested in descriptive grammar – how people actually use language as opposed to how the prescriptivists say people should use language.

And yet I find myself forever avoiding ending sentences with prepositions, and silently (and sometimes not-so-silently) correcting fewer and less, and I and me, and several other common ‘mistakes’. After all these years, Miss Coles still has much for which to answer. (I could have said 'to answer for', but Miss Coles would not have permitted that.)

Ah, Miss Coles, eh? Mine was Mrs Macintosh, a married woman and I was but young.

I'd have written, 'to answer for'. Would Miss Coles have been strict and severe?

 

[SamScribble]

Ah, Miss Coles, eh? Mine was Mrs Macintosh, a married woman and I was but young.

I'd have written, 'to answer for'. Would Miss Coles have been strict and severe?

Miss Coles was barely five foot tall and she had bright white hair. But she carried a mean ruler. Knuckles were fair game back in those days.

 

[TadOverdon]

I care less and less about formal grammar because I know most of it intuitively at this point (I know, you can't prove that by some of my posts) and can make reasonable adjustments for the sake of style (such as sentence fragments). because a significant part of my fiction is dialogue. In dialogue, the question is "does this sound like something someone would really say?" It's easy to compose a sentence that has the sometimes a-grammatical structure of speech, but that simply manages to be clumsy as a result rather than plausible.

But I'm still working on short declarative sentences.

Yeah, I'll start a sentence with a preposition.

 

[Trionyx]

When writing in the first person, one should use the language that the individual might use, including grammatical mistakes and sentence fragments. Likewise, the same should apply when writing conversation.

I believe that correct grammar and spelling should be the goal otherwise.

 

[TadOverdon]

Yeah, I'll disagree with the proscriptive "should." Third person can track almost as closely to the viewpoint character's thought processes as can first person. My personal preference for it is the obvious one; it enables me to get into the heads of more than a single character. But the vocabulary and sentence structure can vary from character to character.

 

[SimonDoom]

Yeah, I'll disagree with the proscriptive "should." Third person can track almost as closely to the viewpoint character's thought processes as can first person. My personal preference for it is the obvious one; it enables me to get into the heads of more than a single character. But the vocabulary and sentence structure can vary from character to character.

I agree, and I think authors often underestimate the ability to tell a story from a character's point of view in third person. 26 of 36 of my stories are in third person. 10 are in 1st person, but 8 of those are chapters of a single story, so if you count that as one then I use third person much more often.

The advantages of third person are two: one, you can get into the heads of more characters, so you can introduce multiple perspectives, and, two, you have more freedom with your narrative voice. In first person, the narrative voice should, presumably, track the background and education and point of view of the narrator/character. But in third person you are totally free. You can tell the narrative however you want, unconstrained by the limits of your characters.

 

[TadOverdon]

I have never written an erotic story (or porn, which is what I really do) in first person. For the most part I've used third person limited, where at least within each scene the narrator sticks to the POV of a single character. More recently I'm using, and wrestling with and generally abusing, third person omniscient with the POV sometimes changing from one paragraph to the next.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I tried my last story in 3rd person to see if I could (I've done a couple drafts before, and some non-erotica), and it worked quite well. I did find myself dumbing down the language a bit to avoid using narrative that wouldn't sound too odd in one or the other character's vernacular, but for a quick story about fucking that didn't matter.

 

[TadOverdon]

The attraction and the curse of first person is, IMHO, that it's the most natural way to write for most of us. When we converse or carry on correspondence, we do it first person. All of our attempts to express feelings, opinion, experience throughout our lives? First person. We go through life telling ourselves and others the story of our lives.

How fully and successfully do we separate our beliefs and ideas and expectations about what's happening to us from the experiences we're really having? Again, IMHO, not nearly as clearly as we'd like or think we're doing at any moment.

There's the rub. For a story, the writer usually has to be able to see those things about the narrator that the narrator does not see about themselves and to communicate truthfully what the character would obscure from both themselves and others without the artifice being obvious.

I've seen it in suspense novels, though of course at this moment I can't bring a specific example to mind. The writer needs to have the narrator notice a thing but "not notice it," which is to say to miss the significance of the thing until later. It has to be done clearly enough to give the information to the reader without having the narrator appear to be stupidly oblivious to what's happening.

 

[KeithD]

The attraction and the curse of first person is, IMHO, that it's the most natural way to write for most of us.

The attraction of first person writing for erotica, I think, is that it's the most intimate voice, and that's what erotica is about--intimacy. I'd have to say that at least half of the erotica I write is in the first person.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Third person can track almost as closely to the viewpoint character's thought processes as can first person. My personal preference for it is the obvious one; it enables me to get into the heads of more than a single character. But the vocabulary and sentence structure can vary from character to character.

Agree. I started writing using first person because it was easier to learn about point of view by writing from a singular one, or because the stories were true or my own fantasies where I was the leading man.

Then I discovered the power of limited third person and the flood gates opened. I can get in just as close as with first person (someone said, "My god, you get next to them on the pillow whereas I want to go away and close the door") and, as you say, have the ability to wander. I use both first and third now, probably equally, and usually decided upon after the first paragraph. I rarely make a conscious decision to use one or the other. The muse decides.

 

[Bramblethorn]

When writing in the first person, one should use the language that the individual might use, including grammatical mistakes and sentence fragments. Likewise, the same should apply when writing conversation.

I believe that correct grammar and spelling should be the goal otherwise.

What makes a particular choice "correct" or "incorrect"? This isn't a simple question.

 

[SimonDoom]

When writing in the first person, one should use the language that the individual might use, including grammatical mistakes and sentence fragments. Likewise, the same should apply when writing conversation.

I believe that correct grammar and spelling should be the goal otherwise.

I only partly agree. Let's say you are writing in the first person POV from the POV of an uneducated person. If you actually wrote the way that person would narrate a story in real life, it would be insufferably annoying. It would be unreadable. The better thing is to write more or less grammatically correctly but to make some modifications that suggest the person's lack of education without hitting the reader over the head with it. A little goes a long way in writing when it comes to deviating from standard conventions -- that's my theory.

If you write from the POV of a young person, you can get away with a more grammatically correct level of narration on the theory that the story is being told later in life, when the narrator is older. An example is To Kill A Mockingbird, which is written from the POV of a young girl in the Deep South, but as a literate adult, later in life.