As an IT professional, I use regular expressions every day. Regular expression (or RegEx) is a syntax employed by modern programming and web tools to provide sophisticated pattern-matching capabilities. They scare me a little, because I maintain that all non-trivial regular expressions are what John Dykstra used to call “miracle programs”, programs that are wrong and only appear to work because they have not yet met the right input data that will cause them to stumble, embarrassingly, disastrously, into ruin.
Still, they are handy, and let us go way beyond the simple wildcard matches of yesteryear. So it is not surprising that OpenOffice/LibreOffice, the open source replacements for Microsoft Office written by a global community of uber-geeks, support RegEx. As and author, I use this capability quite a lot. When writing a novel, it is not uncommon to realize (or worry) that you have been systematically making some grammatical or mechanical mistake—it happens to the best of us—or simply to decide to make some global change. Simple search-and-replace is a boon, but RegEx takes us further. For example, “^And” will find lines beginning with a conjunction, “ to [:alpha:]*[\.\!\?]” will find sentences ending with (one particular) preposition.
I have also used RegEx when preparing text for on-line submission, where in-line text needs to be readable on a wide variety of clients. I use an online tool (http://www.formatit.com/) to insert linefeeds enough to format my pasted text to the proper width for submission, then past it back into Libre and use a global replace to transform the end of each line (“$”) into a pair of linefeeds (“\n\n”) and so produce text that remains double spaced even when divorced from the text styles of th word processor.
Recently, I noticed a particular sentence in which I had used three “em” dashes. I wanted to come back to it later, but had forgotten where it was. Rather than search through all 300 dashes in my manuscript, I save the file as text and used the following command line to find my quarry:
grep -o -e "[^\.\!?]*—[^\.\!?]*—[^\.\!?]*—[^\.\!?]*[\.\!?\"]" "Doomsday's Wake.txt"
This searches for any string of letters containing three dashes and preceding a sentence-ending punctuation mark. (If you know RegEx, you know that a repetition operator can simplify this, but for some reason, the version of grep I am running won’t accept it).
That solved, I used this to count the total number of sentences in my document:
grep -o -e "[^\.\!?]*[\.\!?\"]" "Doomsday's Wake.txt"
and this to display all those using a pair of dashes for review:
grep -o -n -e "[^\.\!?]*—[^\.\!?]*[\.\!?\"]" "Doomsday's Wake.txt" | more
Powertools: they’re not just for motor-heads.
I was just notified that my short story “Frame Zero” won 1st place in the Colonnade Writing Contest. Short stories are harder, in a way, than novels, because they require so much of the world to remain outside the narrative. This one was interesting because it all revolves around a boy at the crossroads of two different kinds of revolution, and his backstory, future, and familial relations are only hinted at. It was a lot of fun.
“Frame Zero”, is about a brilliant boy who learns that his father has been arrested after studying a signal from space that he thinks is a message from God. On the eave of a great religious war, the boy goes over his father’s notes and realizes the signal can only be from a spacecraft launched twelve thousand years ago from earth–from before the accepted creation.
Stephen Covey once said “constructive criticism is the greatest gift one ca hope for”, and he was right. Participating in a critique group is a tricky enterprise. You want to be encouraging, but you want to give constructive criticism–that’s why we’re all here.
It is surprising, then, how frequently a writer will argue with the critique, and even more so, how frequently his argument breaks down — one way or another — to some version of “Yeah, I already knew that was a problem.”
I shouldn’t be surprised of course. This is the natural human desire to save face–even if only in our own eyes, and we ALL are guilty of it at one time or another.
Literary critique, fellow space travelers, should not be that time. You asked for my critique, I give it. I try very, very hard to be constructive (even if the POV shifts eight times in the first paragraph and you mis-spell your own main character’s name in the second) and the only response I need from you is “thanks.” It is, after all, only my opinion; you are free to disagree, or agree, or agree and ignore me anyway for reasons that satisfy only you. It’s your writing after all, and I will think no more or less of you for not writing what I would have written (in fact, I’d just as soon you didn’t!).
But please, please don’t agree with me and tell me “yeah, I knew that was a problem”, because from my end of the transaction, that translates as “yeah, I don’t mind wasting other people’s time and effort.”
Cheers.
Much is made today about “head hopping”, the confusing tendency of some authors to hop omnisciently from one character’s perspective to another, even within the same scene. This is seldom, if ever, effective, but that doesn’t mean that perspective should never shift–even within a scene.
Often, I will begin a scene with sweeping omniscience, and then narrow down to one character’s head:
The taut gray fabric of the lift kite snapped and crackled in the sunlight, three turbines whirring below as they stole power from the wind and sent it down a ribbon to the approaching LCUI. Three kilometers below, Lieutenant Calvin McCaffrey stood at parade rest, boot heels buried in the white sand, hands clasped stiffly behind his back, and waited as the flat nose of the landing ship plowed through the lagoon directly towards him, one outrigger displacing sheets of water in defiance of the kite’s starboard tug.
High on a nearby ridge, Dylan wondered aloud what the hell the man was doing.
Why do I do this? Because it lets me set the scene in a very cinematic way. It creates in the mind a world larger than the characters, and then the sense of panning down into their lives. Here, I start by describing a wider scene, information that all the characters might know because they live in this world while we are only visiting. I then zoom in on a conversation, and in the following lines, I will zoom into one character’s head–and stay there until the end of the scene.
Think of it like the opening pan in cinematography.Used judiciously, it is a very effective tool, and like any tool, it can be used to craft or to butcher.
Christopher Hitchens has “shuffled off this mortal coil” and we are saddened and impoverished at the news. I had the great good fortune of attending one of his last public appearances, and was as moved by his humility and kindness as by his resolve and wit.
He is gone, but has gone nowhere, and lives on in the only form of immortality that any of us, if we are honest with ourselves, can confidently aspire to, his works and ideas.
His contributions to reason, philosophy, and English literature will remain with us for generations, and as a writer myself, I delight that owing to the human ingenuity he cherished so much, his words will linger in inspiration forever.
It never ceases to amaze me how willing people are, in this Internet age, to step right in and demonstrate their ignorance when they might just as easily, and with the same exact tool, correct it.
I was called to task a little while ago for using “Leverage” as a verb. Now, I have an MBA, so I honestly never really thought about it–we used it that way all the time in finance. A quick visit to Google found many many posts making the same claim: “Leverage is not a verb you fool! It’s a neologism of the worst sort and a sure sign of a poor education!”
Well, no.
First, language evolves, and English as we know it would not exist without neologisms and other mechanisms of change. But more to the point, leverage is, in fact, a perfectly “acceptable” transitive verb. From Merriam Webster:
Leverage (verb):
1: to provide (as a corporation) or supplement (as money) with leverage; also : to enhance as if by supplying with financial leverage
2: to use for gain : exploit
But even if this were not the case, I would argue in favor of the verb form. I agree with Bill Brohaugh of everythingyouknowaboutenglishiswrong.com:
“And I hear some of you saying . . . you blast conversate when converse is available, yet you defend leverage when lever is available?” I do indeed. Conversate fills no need. It is duplicative, a bizarre “synonym” of converse. On the other hand, leverage is not a precise synonym of lever, neither in noun nor in verb form. It fills a need.”
So there you have it, and on we shall go, leveraging the technology at our fingertips to more clearly converse with our fellow miscreant.
Everyone over on Sodahead is eager to defend “the rules of grammar”, and oh how it does the heart good. The trouble, of course, is that there is not now, nor has there ever been, a definitive authority on “correct” English grammar. You can point to Strunk & White or Brown, but neither are universally adhered to by anyone.
And because people tend to invent rationalizations for their preferences you can find British grammarians who will eloquently and exhaustively explain why the terminal punctuation belongs outside the quotation marks, and American experts who just as eloquently and thoroughly explain why it does not.
The reality is, English is parsed by people, not by CPUs. It needs to be clear, but it needs to be varied and interesting, and it needs to connote and imply. It needs to gamble and flirt and occasionally betray. As in any other artistic endeavor, we must understand the rules, but then we must break them. If we were unwilling to do so, we would all still be speaking Latin (or Aramaic), we would know neither Falkner nor Shakespeare, and we certainly would be impoverished without the tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells.
And who would wish to live in such a world?
I still see many grammarians warning hapless new writers of the horrors of beginning any sentence with “And” or “But”. Well I am here to tell you, my pedantic friends, that while the product of the hapless masses may well be wrong, SO ARE YOU for claiming this to be a rule.
These constructions have long been been considered solecisms, on par with the double negative (which, when combined with the dialectical “ain’t” is the quintessential modern English incarnation of the solecism, or “gutter speak” corruption of language. But when it comes to actual correctness of the prefatory “and” or “but”, it depends.
On the one hand, it is certainly wrong to begin a sentence with a conjunction. However, it is not wrong to begin a fully independent sentence with a word or phrase that communicates the useful information that it will further develop points made earlier. And so it is that these words can appear at the beginning of a sentences without acting as a solecistic conjunction.
But of course, such words can also signal a change of rhetorical direction clearly and more concisely than a longer phrase such as “On the other hand”. Such a usage clearly is not intended to conjoin two independent clauses into a sloppy construction, and makes the writing more concise and varied.
And so my friends, I do not fear the “And originated sentence”, and I do not accept the authority of any self-appointed grammarian to tell me not to use it. I am, after all, a reader as well as a writer, and the pedantic enforcement of this “rule” has done much, over the last century, to confound and confuse the unwary.