Saturday, 21 September 2019

My experiments with writing

While writing I used to make 2 basic errors:

One, I tended to write very long sentences with a lot of commas and semi colons. Once I wrote a sentence that was in the Dostoyevsky style, i.e. half a page long. It was all grammatically correct but impossible to comprehend unless someone had aced English section in CAT.

Two, I tended to make the “said” part of conversations flowery by using synonyms. Eg: she inquired, she expressed, he mentioned, etc.

Both mistakes were corrected by the wonderful editor at my publisher who told me to use shorter easier to read sentences and stop using too many synonyms for “said”.

1 comment:

  1. Guilty of both, and very much at that!

    I don't write fiction or anything, but I do sometimes have to write prose for events, mails for colleagues/relatives/friends and all. My sentences tend to be too fucking long!

    As for the synonyms, using "said" most of the time becomes too boring, doesn't it?

    ReplyDelete

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