I’m not going to name the book or author because this is basically a random sample and there is no reason to pick on this book/person specifically.
173 reviews. 4.3 star average.
“The only sound was of the doors parting and then the thing dropping through them and hitting the stone floor of the intersection with an impact that sent cracks radiating outward in all directions and knocked Orion back a step.“
Huh? To what does “only sound” apply? These things tend to “stretch” across conjunctions. “The melodious sound of crickets and cicadas.” It’s not just the crickets. It’s also the cicadas. The “sound” is not just the doors parting. It’s also the thing dropping. “only” creates cognitive dissonance.
So many “and“s. “The doors parted with a crash. The thing dropped through them. It hit the stone floor of the intersection with an impact that…“
“Its head was nearly at the ceiling, five times his height at minimum, the goat horns adding another meter above that.” I’d argue the last comma should be a semicolon, but whatever; that’s not the point. “head” is “nearly” at the ceiling with another “meter” of horn. “nearly” is therefore bigger than a meter, but it can’t be too much bigger or it stops being “nearly” in the context of floor to ceiling height.
Same scene about two pages later: “All six arms went up simultaneously, raised above its head in a single converging mass of limb and intention, and the shadow of them covered him completely.” That’s OK, if a bit tight with only about a meter and half to work in, and its also a run on sentence. See what I did there?
Next page: “The Devil leaped. It went straight up, clearing its own height,” No. Just no. The ceiling isn’t high enough.
A bit further along: “He held it and turned, and the Devil went past him, hitting the stone floor at full speed, tearing a furrow through it six meters long before stopping.“
The “and”s again, with a comma splice (or something like that). It could be Oxford comma-ed: “He held it, turned, and the Devil…“.
That leaves us with whatever a two item list with a comma between is called (I think “comma splice” but that may be something else). An “and” actually works there: “The Devil went past him, hitting the stone floor at full speed and tearing a furrow through it six meters long before stopping.” It could be turned into a three item list (I Oxford, but either way works) by de-participle-ing: “The Devil went past him, hit the stone floor at full speed, and tore a furrow through it six meters long before stopping.“
For a fight scene, I think it works even better as grammatically incorrect sentence fragments: “He held it and turned. The Devil went past him. Hit the stone floor at full speed. Tore a six meter furrow before stopping.“
Keep in mind that this is from five pages in a 270 page book. The entire book is this way.
My editing checklist already includes “search for ‘as’ and ‘while'”. They’re not necessarily wrong, but they are vastly over used. It is possible to talk while doing something else, so it tends to be plastered all over dialog. I have a lot of dialog.
I’m not sure I can add “search for ‘ing'” to my checklist. Participles are perfectly legitimate parts of speech; just not that way. Let’s give it a whirl. Chapter 8 is supposedly done. Ctrl-F “ing”.
- The title is “Trekking“. I’m giving that one a pass.
- Second sentence: “Yep, right here,” Tom replied, patting an outside pocket of his pack. I’m giving that one a thumbs-up. It’s not “while patting”, “while he patted”, or “as he patted”.
- Fourth sentence: They took off running, leaving a grave and a dishwasher full of dirty dishes behind them. Hmm. I don’t like “They ran off“. “They left” removes how they left. I’m giving that one a reluctant OK. “leaving behind a grave …” is arguably better, but I can live with my natural phrasing. No, I can’t. I just changed it, but I can’t spend this much time on every sentence.
Skipping the ones that are not in subordinate clauses. There are actually quite a lot of them. “keeping up“, “used to a GPS telling“, etc… By the way, I chose “used to” on purpose; “habituated to” doesn’t feel right.
Another dropped ‘while’: “I miss Goggle Maps,” he remarked, flipping pages.
Sweat was already soaking his t-shirt. “Sweat had already soaked his t-shirt.” is not the same thing. That one is OK.
Tom eyed the rabbits still hanging from Luke’s belt and felt queasy. “that hung”? Tom eyed the rabbits that hung from Luke’s belt and felt queasy. It works. “still hanging” feels better, but that’s to be expected. If it didn’t feel better, I wouldn’t have written it that way. I wonder if it _is_ better.
“You know,” Luke said, looking at Tom’s sweat-soaked t-shirt, “that… I’m detecting a pattern. “Doh,” he agreed, pulling the sodden t-shirt over his head.
Here’s a comma weirdness with “ing”s: Tom paged through the map, looking for this area, elbowing Luke a couple of times in the process. This is _exactly_ the sentence structure I tore apart above. imperfect, participle, participle. One works. Two do not. Tom paged through the map, looking for this area. He elbowed Luke a couple of times in the process. Fixed.
The cost/benefit on this is dreadful. I must learn to catch that as I go. I wonder if Libre does regular expression search. \, [.*]ing should find them. Hah! It does do regex. Does that work? It’s not finding anything. Let me put that sentence back the way it was. Nope. This is the fun thing about regular expressions: They’re implemented very irregularly.
And these are VERY greedy. “, .+ing” (no quotes) found this:
, yeah? Trying to trek through all these hills and find a ford? Definitely not. They built the road here for a reason. The most likely one being
I don’t dispute the match. I dispute the usefulness of the result. The solution is to change .+ to something that doesn’t include a space. AI for the win: , \S+ing.
“, dropping” it’s another dropped ‘while’: “Are you sure?” Tom asked, dropping his pack and peeling off his shirt.
He dodged around a tree, trying to both avoid it and get at its side. Only one. Dandy.
The cat didn’t follow, but just turned, swiping at Luke’s head. Only one. (The cat is the “it” in the previous sentence.)
And it looped around to find the one that started this mess. That has been added to the edit checklist.
It finds the “dropped ‘while'” pattern, which is inconvenient, but at least, I’ll be aware of how often I’m using it.
Update: What good is an edit checklist if you don’t use it?
A double-hit in Chapter 3: “Let’s see what the radio has to say,” Luke not-answered, avoiding the subject, while walking around to the passenger side. I think that’s fine.
From sparring in Chapter 4: They both grew stronger, tearing and biting at each other. There’s nothing wrong with “tearing and biting”. There is something wrong with that comma. Nothing jumps to mind, so I’m leaving it.
Just a bit later: Tom took advantage of the distraction, rolling away, twisting, and snapping at Luke’s tail. Same comma issue, but there is no “ing” issue; they’re in a proper list. I think a dash (one of the three of them) might be better, but no one uses dashes; I’m leaving the commas.
This is one is bad: “That worked! It seems broken, but it works,” Tom exclaimed, panting as he released Luke, a wave of pleasure washing over him. “I even leveled up for beating you.” The comma needs to be an “and” and “washing” needs to be imperfect. “That worked! It seems broken, but it works,” Tom exclaimed, panting as he released Luke and a wave of pleasure washed over him. “I even leveled up for beating you.”
Missed infinitive in Chapter 7: Luke squirmed about, trying to pin his arms or get free without being pummeled. It took several reads to find that while I wondered why “getting free”, to parallel “trying”, made it worse. “get free” should be parallel with “to pin”. Trying to pin or to get. Fixed.
And that’s it. The dropped ‘while’ pattern is everywhere, but this comma splice thing is not something I often do. Interesting that it showed up in the first chapter I chose to look at.
Marked Up 