Turning a thread on its head.

[AG31]

There's a thread called Grammar help, please! that's been active over the last 24 hours or so, where we've passionately discussed when you should use "I" and when "me."

This has raised a related, but opposite question in my mind. When does the proper use sound just so stilted that you can't possibly use it? What are some examples? I find myself, sometimes tortuously, re-creating the sentence to avoid "bad" grammar.

I delayed posting this because I wanted to present some examples of impossibly stilted proper grammar, but I just couldn't think of any. Can you?

 

[MillieDynamite]

In dialogue, when you protray an ignorant person, it is a must that they shit grammar. "And how do you do this fine morning?" doesn't work for an idgit! "How ya doing, yestday you was offen yer feed."

 

[crookedletter]

Any and all uses of “whom.”

 

[MillieDynamite]

And to whom are you directing that?

Any and all uses of “whom.”

 

[Kumquatqueen]

The prohibition on ending a sentence with a proposition is something up with which I shall not put.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

And to whom are you directing that?

Ernestine, is that you?

 

[MrPixel]

Any and all uses of “whom.”

I occasionally have my MMC use this to tweak the FMC in their banter.

 

[iwatchus]

My characters are almost all highly educated -- sorry, but I write what I know -- so I get to stick with proper grammar, including whom.

I do not teach English, but, damnit, every one of my students better know how and when to use an adverb before they get their diploma. I have had multiple students come back years after graduation and tell me they still think of me with my adverbs. And they still use them properly.

 

[MillieDynamite]

But adverbs are lazy writing. Haven't you seen Outbreak? It has to be true, cause Kevin Spacey never lies except maybe in depositions of his sex life and use of force. I say maybe because it is possible that those 20 people all lied.

My characters are almost all highly educated -- sorry, but I write what I know -- so I get to stick with proper grammar, including whom.

I do not teach English, but, damnit, every one of my students better know how and when to use an adverb before they get their diploma. I have had multiple students come back years after graduation and tell me they still think of me with my adverbs. And they still use them properly.

 

[Voboy]

90% of interpersonal communication in English is going to include dangling participles. So? Dangle those fucking participles. Go on. Dangle 'em.

I usually notice "proper English grammar" in dialogue by writers enslaved to style guides. Fuck that. When people are talking, they seldom use proper grammar. Make your dialogue believable, not correct.

IMO, the same thing goes for FP narration. Your narrator in FP should sound like a person, not a thesaurus.

 

[Cagivagurl]

Proper grammar often makes speech, dialogue sound clunky and impersonal. For me personally.
People in every day life don't speak using grammar as a rule.
I prefer to see dialogue written as it might be heard in normal life.

Cagivagurl

 

[NuclearFairy]

I think I might go have myself a nice long existential crisis now.

 

[iwatchus]

Proper grammar often makes speech, dialogue sound clunky and impersonal. For me personally.
People in every day life don't speak using grammar as a rule.
I prefer to see dialogue written as it might be heard in normal life.

Cagivagurl

You need to tune your dialog to the characters and their community. The conversations I had when I worked construction for a summer are very different than what I hear in the faculty lounge. I was as an assistant manager at a convenience store just off a military base while I was in college. That was very interesting, because you had the town/gown and uniform split. And regional variations as well as officer vs enlisted for the military personnel. Would be lots of good fodder for characters if I remembered them all still.

 

[AG31]

In dialogue, when you protray an ignorant person, it is a must that they shit grammar. "And how do you do this fine morning?" doesn't work for an idgit! "How ya doing, yestday you was offen yer feed."

I'm talking about when we're (educated people) are in real life.

 

[AG31]

My characters are almost all highly educated -- sorry, but I write what I know -- so I get to stick with proper grammar, including whom.

I do not teach English, but, damnit, every one of my students better know how and when to use an adverb before they get their diploma. I have had multiple students come back years after graduation and tell me they still think of me with my adverbs. And they still use them properly.

Yeah, but in real life haven't you bumped into a time when using proper grammar would just sound impossibly stilted? Not a character in a story.

 

[iwatchus]

Yeah, but in real life haven't you bumped into a time when using proper grammar would just sound impossibly stilted? Not a character in a story.

There are some forms of improprer grammar that I am almost never surprised to hear. Incomplete sentences most notably. Danling prepositions as well. "Where did you disappear to?" Fixing that almost always sounds stilted.

On the other hand, I have many conversations where using me incorrectly vs I would be glaring, as would saying "I speak proper."

On the construction site or with many of the enlisted, neither of those grammatical gaffes would be surprising. And I would be inclined to include them. Buthaving most my characters be well spoken makes my life easier, because I would have to force those kinds of speech patterns.

 

[Cagivagurl]

You need to tune your dialog to the characters and their community. The conversations I had when I worked construction for a summer are very different than what I hear in the faculty lounge. I was as an assistant manager at a convenience store just off a military base while I was in college. That was very interesting, because you had the town/gown and uniform split. And regional variations as well as officer vs enlisted for the military personnel. Would be lots of good fodder for characters if I remembered them all still.

Absolutely...
No argument here. Dialogue should feel natural, language, IE: searing... The use of modern idioms... Slang... They all must fit the setting.

Cagivagurl

 

[Britva415]

90% of interpersonal communication in English is going to include dangling participles. So? Dangle those fucking participles. Go on. Dangle 'em.

I usually notice "proper English grammar" in dialogue by writers enslaved to style guides. Fuck that. When people are talking, they seldom use proper grammar. Make your dialogue believable, not correct.

IMO, the same thing goes for FP narration. Your narrator in FP should sound like a person, not a thesaurus.

The whole "dangling participles" thing is an example of a hypercorrection, though - not an example of "proper grammar."

There are some style guides which proscribe it, but that doesn't mean it's grammatically wrong.

 

[SimonDoom]

90% of interpersonal communication in English is going to include dangling participles. So? Dangle those fucking participles. Go on. Dangle 'em.

I usually notice "proper English grammar" in dialogue by writers enslaved to style guides. Fuck that. When people are talking, they seldom use proper grammar. Make your dialogue believable, not correct.

IMO, the same thing goes for FP narration. Your narrator in FP should sound like a person, not a thesaurus.

In dialogue, it makes sense to incorporate dangling participle, because people actually talk that way. Dangling participle exist because of the way we construct sentences on the fly as we speak.

But I can't see a good case for using them in narrative. Dangling participles genuinely cloud meaning.

Example: walking through the forest for the first time, the old tree almost hit us when it fell.

This involves a dangling participle, and it's a mess, because the way the participial phrase (starting with "walking") is attached next to "the old tree", it reads as though the old tree was walking. It should be

Walking through the forest for the first time, we were almost hit by the old tree when it fell.

Or if you insist on active voice:

Walking through the old forest for the first time, we had to dodge the old tree when it fell.

 

[Voboy]

In dialogue, it makes sense to incorporate dangling participle, because people actually talk that way. Dangling participle exist because of the way we construct sentences on the fly as we speak.

But I can't see a good case for using them in narrative. Dangling participles genuinely cloud meaning.

Example: walking through the forest for the first time, the old tree almost hit us when it fell.

This involves a dangling participle, and it's a mess, because the way the participial phrase (starting with "walking") is attached next to "the old tree", it reads as though the old tree was walking. It should be

Walking through the forest for the first time, we were almost hit by the old tree when it fell.

Or if you insist on active voice:

Walking through the old forest for the first time, we had to dodge the old tree when it fell.

It was just one example of a "grammar rule" that needn't be strictly enforced. In your examples, there are much better, more entertaining, more elegant ways to convey that event in sentences that won't involve the risk of a dangler.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I'm talking about when we're (educated people) are in real life.

Educated people may choose to use varied dialects and registers of speech, and code-switch between them as appropriate. A formal speech for an academy will be very different from how the speaker talks at home, which in turn may be different from how they talk with their neighbours. I'd sound well weird if I didn't use London dialect words and accent locally, even though I almost never use the dialect grammar - "we was" is a step too far to come naturally from my mouth.

People in every day life don't speak using grammar as a rule.
I prefer to see dialogue written as it might be heard in normal life.

Unconvincing dialogue is probably the top thing that has me clicking out of a story within half a page. But all speech beyond babyhood has grammar - just that certain less-prestigious dialects are deemed 'non-standard', or 'uneducated'. You often get people using such dialects as a sign of belonging and building local cohesion, as well as for excluding people who don't understand them.

 

[stickygirl]

When I 'did' Pride and Prejudice at school, I remember re-reading the first page several times before I could make any sense of it. I suspect too that Austen felt compelled to record speech in her strait-jacketed style, so leaving us with -

"From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that the groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike."

She actually said
"Jesus, you are such a prick and I've always thought so."

 

[AG31]

I delayed posting this because I wanted to present some examples of impossibly stilted proper grammar, but I just couldn't think of any. Can you?

Hubby came to the rescue:

Albert: Lisa, is that you I hear coming through the woods?
Lisa: Yes, Albert, it's I.

 

[Voboy]

Hubby came to the rescue:

Albert: Lisa, is that you I hear coming through the woods?
Lisa: Yes, Albert, it's I.

If I were doing that kind of thing in dialogue, I'd do it to emphasize that the speaker was ELL, or a time-traveler, or something like that.

 

[Gamblnluck]

Proper grammar often makes speech, dialogue sound clunky and impersonal. For me personally.
People in every day life don't speak using grammar as a rule.
I prefer to see dialogue written as it might be heard in normal life.

Cagivagurl

I sometimes go to vernacular a bit. More often, my dialog is an easy speaking. I skip lots of the proper grammar rules. Ending with a preposition is one of the first