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potted_music at 09:52pm on 22/04/2012
potted_music at 09:52pm on 22/04/2012Two fic-related linguistic pet peeves:
1) If a character's first language doesn't have articles, said character probably won't omit articles in English; if my experience, both personal and anecdotal, is anything to go by, overusage of articles is way more likely (an article where there shouldn't be one! wrong articles! bring them on, all of them!). It also doesn't mean that that character will be using only short words. Random combinations of words from aaaall the possible stylistic strata ("have you gobbled a thesaurus?" word quickly followed by something very slangy) conveys "ESL speaker here" way more effectively, in my experience. For all his other misgivings, Jonathan Saffran Foer got this tick right.
2) For some reason, the Sherlock fandom seems to believe that clipped sentences that lose either a subject or a predicate convey brilliance: see, he thinks so fast that he cannot bother with coherent sentences! (Example from a random fic - I have nothing against the fic itself, which I couldn't finish because this thing bugs me too much: Eyes are gummy, nose feels flattened and sore, mild ache in left mandibular lateral incisor. Probe it with my tongue. Loose, but won’t fall out. Thank God, I hate the dentists. Aching head. Bit of blood; copper taste. Eyes open: bleary. Sticky. Got roughed up a bit last night.) His speech seems clipped in canon too, but that's because he jumps from observation to observation breaking the earthian notion of causality, not because he disregards syntax. Way to recreate the outside effect with utter disregard for its causes, yeah. And, generally, unless the character is Rorschach (Watchmen), who truly really speaks like that in canon, so there is nothing to be done about that, this stylistic choice, if overused, just makes the character look heavily concussed.
1) If a character's first language doesn't have articles, said character probably won't omit articles in English; if my experience, both personal and anecdotal, is anything to go by, overusage of articles is way more likely (an article where there shouldn't be one! wrong articles! bring them on, all of them!). It also doesn't mean that that character will be using only short words. Random combinations of words from aaaall the possible stylistic strata ("have you gobbled a thesaurus?" word quickly followed by something very slangy) conveys "ESL speaker here" way more effectively, in my experience. For all his other misgivings, Jonathan Saffran Foer got this tick right.
2) For some reason, the Sherlock fandom seems to believe that clipped sentences that lose either a subject or a predicate convey brilliance: see, he thinks so fast that he cannot bother with coherent sentences! (Example from a random fic - I have nothing against the fic itself, which I couldn't finish because this thing bugs me too much: Eyes are gummy, nose feels flattened and sore, mild ache in left mandibular lateral incisor. Probe it with my tongue. Loose, but won’t fall out. Thank God, I hate the dentists. Aching head. Bit of blood; copper taste. Eyes open: bleary. Sticky. Got roughed up a bit last night.) His speech seems clipped in canon too, but that's because he jumps from observation to observation breaking the earthian notion of causality, not because he disregards syntax. Way to recreate the outside effect with utter disregard for its causes, yeah. And, generally, unless the character is Rorschach (Watchmen), who truly really speaks like that in canon, so there is nothing to be done about that, this stylistic choice, if overused, just makes the character look heavily concussed.