Naomi's description here:

http://www.writewords.org.uk/forum/65_347743.asp

of publishing types using technical terms wrongly and then condemning (maybe rightly, maybe not) the writing in those terms, has made me want to blog about it, and I'd love some help.

The ones pointed out in that thread are:

1) "Running down the road he jumped on a bus" has a gerund phrase opener.

No it hasn't. Whether it's good writing or not (which the phrase 'gerund phrase opener' certainly isn't), "running" is a participle, not a gerund. It's a gerund in "Running down the road is a bad idea" but that's quite a different thing.

2) "anything with 'was' in it is passive voice"

No it isn't. What about "He was angry" "She was Lord Mayor"? And quite often such ignoramuses talk about 'passive tense' which compounds their felony.

What wrongly-understood, wrongly-applied technical ignorance drives you nuts? (And please, can we not get into Daily Mail Disgusted-of-Tunbridge-Wells stuff about the ill-educated younger generation? It's the mis-application of education by people who ought to know better that gets my goat, and that I'm going on about here.)

Emma

Oh dear, the gerund thing was me, wasn't it? Mea culpa - I've got a mental block about gerunds and gerundives, always have had, and yes, as someone who's got 'A' level Latin and did modern languages at uni, I should have known better

Astrea, no, I didn't mean you at all - I was thinking of the interns that Naomi was quoting...

Emma

Asteaa, no, not you. It was me. I was quoting from a tweeting intern (internamie, who has since been hounded off twitter, but that's another story).


The problem is, whether tecnically it's right or wrong, when it comes to writing advice it has an element of truth but to explain it fully would take too long and go over most people's heads so it's used as shorthand.


However, what gets my goat is the confusion between Submissions (UK) and Queries (US) which are very different animals, and if you went round Querying UK agents you are liable to be rejected for all the wrong reasons.

<Added>

Another is 'Pitching' your mss, which, again, is a US thing, and most UK agents advise against it.

Just to add, if one was told the chapter has 'too much passive voice' or 'too many gerundive openings', then looking it up in a technical manual and discovering that, technically, that's not what they are, can leave the writer very confused.
It helps to know what the agent/tutor/critter means by it, rather than what it actually is.

Same with 'too much exposition' which some may call 'backstory' or 'info dumps', or some may simply advise 'Show not Tell', and which can result in the poor writer stripping out all scene setting description to the point where the reader can't visualise the setting.

I have several good friends who write erotic romance (ie soft porn, but with proper characters and actual plots) for the e-publishing market. The publishers are mainly American. I have witnessed my friends' pain for several years. All the erotic romance e-publishers believe that any sentence that contains "was" or any word ending in "ing" is "in passive voice". It's endemic. I watched one friend going crazy because the editor made her strip every single use of "was" and all "ings" out of a novel. Afterwards, she was so upset by the experience that she left the publisher.

Catkin, how totally weird!

Catkin, I believe that's a particular American interpretation of 'passive voice' - which is not grammatical but based on 'voice' as used in writing terms. There's where the confusion arises I think. Passive voice is a grammatical term. But they use it to mean an authorial voice that is too passive, i.e. not dynamic enough. Not saying they're right, just that that was how it was explained to me once.

It's certainly true that I've thought 'this is all terribly passive' about a piece of writing, and then found that there isn't a passive mood verb anywhere in the piece - it just has that air about it.

Emma

People using 'disinterested' when they mean 'uninterested'. Disinterested means impartial or not havinh a vested interest in something, but people routinely use it to imply a lack of interest in something. Makes me yelp with irritation!

EmmaH, I agree with you about disinterested/uninterested - irritates me too - but the confusion occurs so often that I'm beginning to feel uncertain - has this use of one word to mean the other now sort of entered the language and become acceptable?

Frances

I think it's going that way, much to my annoyance. Such an important distinction.

Emma

'a myriad of'

Jan

The commonest form of technical ignorance that I find irritating is a misuse of punctuation. For example, I've come across a published book in which the author frequently starts a sentence with the word 'but', and in every case follows the word with a comma. I've also come across books in which paragraph breaks occur in places where they aren't needed, or where there isn't a paragraph break where there should be one. I've also come across commas used where semi-colons or full-stops are required, or sentences that run on from one another with no punctuation.

These are the kinds of thing that drive me nuts, as they tend to snag me, or else break up the narrative flow and make it harder to read the prose without having to keep going back and re-reading things.

As for mis-applied terms like 'gerund' or 'passive voice', I would tend to steer clear of advice which made that mistake. If an editor told me I was using passive voice when I knew I wasn't, I would look for an editor who did know what it meant.

Alex

I frequently start sentences with "but". And "An". And I frequently don't include a verb.

I always thought it was "grasp the mettle" but lots of people nowadays say "grasp the nettle", which always makes me giggle.