Fanfiction Lounge

What do you do to avoid purple prose/patching?

I don't do much to avoid it because it rarely happens. Because I write very similarly to the way I talk in situations that don't overflow with a certain emotion (or, um, lack thereof), there are some pretty big words in there on a few occasions, but nothing as traumatic as what you linked to. |D

With the English language, is there something that you always seem to forget (rule wise, either to do with spelling, grammar, or just plain old agreement etc.) that you'd like to see modernized? That is, should it adopt your mistake as the norm?
The English language is the way it is. I may suck at grammar, but I don't think the grammar rules should be changed to "modernized" it and such. Hence, I try my best to not make many of them. ^^;

What do you do to avoid purple prose/patching?
I'm leaning towards action writing now, so there's no need to be all in depth. Just straightforward. :P However, I'm rewriting my fic, Heart of the Sea, and there will be a lot of emotions and not much action. XD Pretty much what I do is tell it like it is--no need to use the thesaurus and writing five pages of how cold outside is.

Bay said:

no need to use the thesaurus and writing five pages of how cold outside is.

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But that's so much fun! :3

In other news, I finally started my Hallowe'en one-shot. It's cracky and out-of-continuity and fourth-wall-destroying, not to mention full of narrator!rage and character!torment. I am gonna have so much fun writing this.

What do you do to avoid purple prose/patching?
Nothing. This question only makes sense if purple prose is something that comes naturally to you and actually needs to be actively avoided. I, on the other hand, couldn't be purple unless I were trying especially hard to, and even then I don't have the vocabulary to make a truly impressive example without poring over a thesaurus.

With the English language, is there something that you always seem to forget (rule wise, either to do with spelling, grammar, or just plain old agreement etc.) that you'd like to see modernized? That is, should it adopt your mistake as the norm?
I really don't make a lot of grammar mistakes to my knowledge, and when I do it's usually botching some sort of an expression that I'm not familiar enough with at the time of writing but will cringe at when I've heard it more often. So, well, no.

In Icelandic, on the other hand, I've been marked down for using English punctuation rules, which I find a great deal clearer, more logical and more consistent than the little there is in the way of Icelandic ones. It is also annoying how Icelandic does not actually have any proper equivalent of the word "whose" that can be used in sentences like, to take an example from my fic, "If he is using a Smeargle, he will have taught it powerful moves of all types, just to exploit people like you whose Pokémon will all fall in one or two hits from the right attack." There is simply absolutely no way to say anything like this in Icelandic unless you somehow rearrange the sentence to eliminate the word "whose", which sometimes gives very awkward results and sometimes isn't even possible at all without actually changing the information you're giving. We do have the word "hvers", which technically means "whose", but it is not actually correct to use it in any of the useful contexts in which the English word "whose" could be used. My brother has simply taken up using "hvers" as he would use "whose", arguing that originally English stole that usage from Old Norse anyway and it just got lost somewhere on the way to modern Icelandic, and sometimes I'm very close to doing the same. It would make things so much easier.

Dragonfree said:

What do you do to avoid purple prose/patching?
Nothing. This question only makes sense if purple prose is something that comes naturally to you and actually needs to be actively avoided. I, on the other hand, couldn't be purple unless I were trying especially hard to, and even then I don't have the vocabulary to make a truly impressive example without poring over a thesaurus.

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Well purple patching is a different beast altogether from prose. It doesn't need to come naturally, but still affects people whom obsess over any given part until they're "perfect". It doesn't even need to end up like the given example, but can still be horrifically patched just by being a little longer than needed.

I had this problem when I was younger. Re-wrote and reworked over and over again... I've since worked that out of my system, but probably replaced it with something worse: I write for simplicity.

What do you do to avoid purple prose/patching?
This is not something I find I have to try to avoid (or at least I think don't). XD;

Ewuch. Corn maze oneshot cancelled due to cringe-worthy fourth-wall-breaking and narrator stupidity. I'll just review other peoples' (if there are any).

Sparkles said:

Ewuch. Corn maze oneshot cancelled due to cringe-worthy fourth-wall-breaking and narrator stupidity. I'll just review other peoples' (if there are any).

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Wait - what? Who did that?

Me, of course. You think I'd diss anyone else like that?

With the English language, is there something that you always seem to forget (rule wise, either to do with spelling, grammar, or just plain old agreement etc.) that you'd like to see modernized? That is, should it adopt your mistake as the norm?

I only tend to make grammatical mistakes because I think too fast. I know exactly what to do and when to do it, I just I get ahead of myself in the sentence. Proofreading twice is pretty much my way of getting read of it since the first time I just find major mistakes as well as fill in spots.Anyway, I do not think I will like to see anything modernized, English grammar, spelling, and agreements seems pretty solid at the moment.

Anyway, I would put another question up but it seems to be enough right now. I'll hold on to it. :)

With the English language, is there something that you always seem to forget (rule wise, either to do with spelling, grammar, or just plain old agreement etc.) that you'd like to see modernized? That is, should it adopt your mistake as the norm?

Semicolons and colons, I get confused as to witch one I should use once in a while.

They should leave the English language alone. (Its not the language's fault people are stupid)

Oh hi. S'up? :cheeky:

It's good to see the Lounge is returning to its state of boltopicsness and lack of one-to-one biteme-scratchme conversations.

バクフーン said:

They should leave the English language alone. (Its not the language's fault people are stupid)

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:laugh: ↑ this. I feel pretty much the same about my Spanish language where I live. But the truth is people (as in "the masses") are simply too stupid to want to learn something difficult.

With the English language, is there something that you always seem to forget (rule wise, either to do with spelling, grammar, or just plain old agreement etc.) that you'd like to see modernized? That is, should it adopt your mistake as the norm?

Forget? Mistake? Commas. Just... friggin'... commas. They are the personal bane of my english communication (not counting pronounciation, but one doesn't write that) and technically the only thing that prevents me from writing formal speech for hire, according to my teacher.

And also "has had been eaten" and things like that.

As for something I'd change, it's not that much of a mistake or something to be modernized, but I think some "features" of English need to become more regular for English to become a more direct language outside US borders (and, fro what I've heard, inside as well...). If English aims at being the "universal language" or at least to have a culturally accepted practical dominance, then it needs to become more easily graspable to other cultures, otherwise it simply becomes an annoyance, not to say a powerful logistic and economic entry barrier to global communications, that gives the Monroe-loving US powers yet another strategic advantage to their self-imposed "World Justice" mission to crush and remove "opposing" (read: different) cultures.

The one reason students fail at English in my country is because they simply don't get the irregular forms, in particular with past participle; it can't be that they're not exposed to the language enough, we have computers and any decent TV series or music comes in English (...or Japanese...) and with all the neologisms and English-infected trends nowadays it's simply impossible that one hasn't learned the most basic grammar rules by osmosis by age 21, the more if they literally spend the computer sciences class playing things like Medal of Honor and Need for Speed...

Aw... Long rant... I think I'll try and stop it now.

Not that I wouldn't have more things to talk about... I mean, there are some weird things with how some verbs affects prepositions. "I eat noobs for breakfast", "I wear [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sarYH0z948]Sunglasses of Justice[/url]", "I watch it for the Economics", yes, but "I listen to music"???? Always seemed strange to me. Maybe it's transitivity or something, I'm not sure.

And this is mostly an annoyance than anything, but it's time the problem of nondescript third person is fixed as well as there are several available paths to modernize that. I'm tired of some people "correcting" me for using either "nongendered 'he'", "singular they", "determinate one", "xe" or "it" at every different place/forum I go, and it becomes worse when certain moods or styles seem to require specific gendericity (legalese v/s scientific writing, for example). Esperanto has ge-prefix to remove gender without loss of generality, something that could be easily tried in English with a "determinate nongendered pronoun" on the same guise as "one" as English seems to lack a third person pronoun that is both fully determinate and nongendered ("it" being the closest, but sounds degrading).
I'd rather favour singular they as it sounds more awesome, if it weren't because of the unicity problems it brings though, with phrases such as "whoever wrote this, they would be insane": who is the "they"? Are they (or is he/she/it/xe/whatever) the "whoever", regardless of definiteness, or are they other third-persons?.
Almost related to that issue is that despite it is mostly pronoun that carries the gender (and it helps a lot against languages such as Spanish), there are nouns in English that seem to carry gender for no reason but to mess with foreigners: for example, "ship" and "yatch" are considered female, yet any other vehicle is nongendered AFAIK.
Nonnumbered second person seems to have the same trouble (you/you) but I haven't seen anyone complaining, probably because of the high market value this figure has for political speech when one can address the masses in a determinate way with a singular-pointing message. Something that other languages don't seem to have. I think this was done on purpose since in older English there was completely determinate singular "thou" (which sounds more awesome).

...Oh was I still ranting?

Whatever.

About the whole NaNoWriMo thing, I intended to enter this year, but my thesis and hunting for job offers are taking most of my awake time. I simply can't find something new to write about that I can write 50K words in the month. I plan on finishing "Sixth" (one release remaining) and the first arc of "Elusive Goals" before December anyways so that I can begin the next year completely fresh. And no, no Halloween entries, because I suck at horror.

solovino said:

snip.

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It might have been a rant, bu was still interesting to read. Indeed, with the History of English course I am taking, it gives a new perspective on the language itself...

Like how I've been told that English is one of the easier languages to learn, but that might not seem so true sometimes. XD

Yeah, random placing of gendered items are rare but at still evident in some cases (there were some more examples but I can't remember them atm).

Anyway, wiki talks a bit about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Grammatical_vs._natural_gender

Almost related to that issue is that despite it is mostly pronoun that carries the gender (and it helps a lot against languages such as Spanish), there are nouns in English that seem to carry gender for no reason but to mess with foreigners: for example, "ship" and "yatch" are considered female, yet any other vehicle is nongendered AFAIK.

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Well, "ship" and "yacht" don't actually carry a gender; if you're talking about a ship or a yacht, generally, you'll use "it" as with all other objects. Referring to them as "she" is merely an affectionate convention among sailors who have come to view their ship almost as a person; essentially it's considered a natural gender, but not a grammatical one.

Not that I wouldn't have more things to talk about... I mean, there are some weird things with how some verbs affects prepositions. "I eat noobs for breakfast", "I wear Sunglasses of Justice", "I watch it for the Economics", yes, but "I listen to music"???? Always seemed strange to me. Maybe it's transitivity or something, I'm not sure.

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What is strange about that? o.O "To listen to something" is a verb-preposition combination meaning a particular thing and not at all parallel to things like "I eat noobs for breakfast" or "I watch it for the economics". For it to be parallel, it would have to be "I eat for noobs" and "I watch for it". "I wear Sunglasses of Justice" is then not in any way parallel to either of them, since the "of" is not dictated by the verb at all and just an incidental part of the object. If you wanted to pick actual parallel sentences to "I listen to music", it would have to be something like "I watch over my little siblings" or "I look at the picture", and even then there's nothing weird about it, since there is not actually any trend being established; it's simply that to "listen to" and "watch over" and "look at" mean particular things that are distinct from just "listening" and "watching" and "looking", if subtly.

Dragonfree said:

Well, "ship" and "yacht" don't actually carry a gender; if you're talking about a ship or a yacht, generally, you'll use "it" as with all other objects. Referring to them as "she" is merely an affectionate convention among sailors who have come to view their ship almost as a person; essentially it's considered a natural gender, but not a grammatical one.

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Strange, because in most if not all sources I've come up to for normal civilian / colloquial usage, both in American and British English, ships and boats are talked about as "her" or directly by name when names are given, and only with "it" when an impersonal action is described (such as "it is a ship, it floats in water"), which suggests me naming actually comes from the gendericity. I'd expect this to be a distinct thing from the whole "H.M.S. Ship Name" where despite there being an obvious female reference that generates gendericity (Her Majesty's...), I don't see a direct relation to the actual naming -- despite being treated as "her", most ships I know carry object or made-up names...


I'd be glad if anyone of the masters here could enlighten me in this case of genders that seemingly pop out from everywhere at once... :D

Maybe there is something specific to the meaning of the word "ship", since I seem to recall in some sci-fi novels, the space vessels, when named as "spaceships", are also treated as "her" whereas other vehicles, such as space cabs or interplanetary rockets are still labeled as "it".

Dragonfree said:

If you wanted to pick actual parallel sentences to "I listen to music", it would have to be something like "I watch over my little siblings" or "I look at the picture", and even then there's nothing weird about it, since there is not actually any trend being established; it's simply that to "listen to" and "watch over" and "look at" mean particular things that are distinct from just "listening" and "watching" and "looking", if subtly.

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Thanks, Dragonfree, that's what explains my issue and it helps a lot. The thing is, again, irregularity. It is usual in latin-derived languages that the declaration of the verb's object does not need to carry any extra particle, except when more things are involved in a sentence, which is where complements, adverbs and prepositions kick in. So if you know that in expressions like "I eat noobs" and "I wear sunglasses", the noobs and the sunglasses are what is eaten or worn, then it would only made sense that if "listen" is the verb and "music" is what is listened, then "I listen music" would be the adequate expression; it turns out, however, that the verb "listen" does not have the same directionality (as in, going from the subject to the object of the action) that the other verbs, which causes the whole "to" issue to look weird to anyone coming from a more regular language where you have one-word verbs to describe contuinuing action ("comer" for eat, "escuchar" for listen(to)ing, etc...).

Excess usage of prepositions wrekcs the little regularity the English language has. Any translation entry for "set (up|in|out|whatever)" is a mess...

Howdy, FFL. Well, I've got a story idea here, and I'd like as much feedback as possible on it. Hasn't been written or developed much past what is below (just thought of it today) but I would really like to do it.

First off, it's not designed to be particularly serious - in fact, some aspects of it are parody of both the games and stuff that tends to happen in Pokémon fanfiction. Shinies are treated slightly differently, but I'll get into that later. So yes, there will be some odd stuff happening.

The story starts off with a Trainer, about seventeen. His name is Lance (no, not the canonical Lance, a different one). He is notorious for being one of those Trainers who really don't give a Ratatta's tail about Pokémon's well-being (though he keeps his Weavile relatively healthy so that it may lay the beatdown on other Pokémon at any time), and occasionally kicks defeated Pokémon's bodies into the surrounding scenery when nobody's around to get a laugh out of it. Anyway, he's just strolling around, on the lookout for any Pokémon he and his Weavile could beat down. They find a large orange-and-black bundle of fur rather far away down the path, and figure it's a Pokémon who's fainted. Weavile points it out to Lance, and they scramble over to see what horrors they could set upon it. However, once they see what it is, Lance loses his balance in surprise and trips.

He skids to a halt in front of a Shiny Zapdos.

Lance catches the unconscious Zapdos immediately (wanting to train it up to aid Weavile's Beat Up attack and fight on its own), names it something stupid (Sugar Cube), and goes back to the Pokémon Center, keeping the Zapdos hidden at all costs. He checks in at a room in the Center for the night, and places his two Pokémon on a tray set out for them. He flops into bed and falls asleep immediately, while a Joy sneaks in quietly to take his Pokémon to be healed. She plans to have them returned to him by dawn.

Basically, Lance has a dream. This is where the alternate interpretation of Shinies comes in; he dreams of some Legendary (possibly Manaphy) rambling on about how some experimentation on Mew's part had spawned a host of alternately-colored Legendaries - Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, Mew, Raikou, Entei, Suicune, Regirock, Regice, Registeel, and Jirachi. Manaphy - who has taken up the position very similar to the oracle of Delphi - then continues that Mew has seriously screwed up in creating these 'artificial' Legendaries, of which there were to be no Shiny forms; he explains it as "Origin [Legendary] Pokémon were meant to be forever in their purest form; this alternate coloration was never to enter and pollute an Origin's body." Mew, of course, had no clue the Legendary clones would be 'polluted' when she created them.

Arceus had dropped one to Earth from the land above the clouds, to leave it battered. He had figured that any human with a kind enough heart to rescue the Pokémon (not realizing that humans knew what Legendary Pokémon were and figured they would think it was a regular one) would therefore be blessed with the task of rounding up the rest of them, strewn around Johto. Guess who's been forced into the job?

solovino said:

Strange, because in most if not all sources I've come up to for normal civilian / colloquial usage, both in American and British English, ships and boats are talked about as "her" or directly by name when names are given, and only with "it" when an impersonal action is described (such as "it is a ship, it floats in water")

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Your right, you never see someone point at a boat and yell, "He's going to sink!" it's always "She's going to sink!" or "Its going to sink!"


Completely off topic here; but its freaking snowing as I type this. o.O

Strange, because in most if not all sources I've come up to for normal civilian / colloquial usage, both in American and British English, ships and boats are talked about as "her" or directly by name when names are given, and only with "it" when an impersonal action is described (such as "it is a ship, it floats in water"), which suggests me naming actually comes from the gendericity.

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The fact that people usually refer to ships as female doesn't make the actual word "ship" feminine. There are a couple of words that vaguely/arguably retain gender in English (blond/blonde being one), but "ship" definitely isn't one. It's actually convention to refer to most large vehicles as feminine--ships, spaceships, cars and similar, etc. tend to be referred to as female. As far as the language itself is concerned, though, they are inanimate objects without gender; the words that refer to them also lack gender. I can't tell you how it came about that people prefer the female pronoun for them, but their actual identifiers are gender-neutral. It's just a quirk of common usage (or a term of endearment, really, usually most often used by the ship's owner/inhabitants), without any actual grammatical basis that I know of--anthropomorphization of an inanimate object that the language doesn't actually treat as anthropomorphized.

I'd expect this to be a distinct thing from the whole "H.M.S. Ship Name" where despite there being an obvious female reference that generates gendericity (Her Majesty's...), I don't see a direct relation to the actual naming -- despite being treated as "her", most ships I know carry object or made-up names...

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You're right, it has nothing to do with the gendering of the ship. "Her Majesty's Ship" is a prefix used for the names of ships in the British Royal Navy--thus they are literally in service of Her Majesty the Queen and belong to her. In the United States you instead have the U.S.S. prefix, "United States Ship." The prefix doesn't have anything to do with the identity or gender classification of the ship itself except to indicate what fleet it belongs to.

That's actually a very original idea, Giratina. (b")b