Deeker’s Writing Rants

 

Below is a list of items that I find all too often in the stories that people submit to me. The items listed are some glaring (and grating) examples of what I consider to be egregiously inexcusable writing mistakes that proper schooling should ensure do not occur in one’s writing. Unfortunately, however, it seems that such skills are either not being taught or are taught inadequately, or that the writers feel that proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, etc. don’t count when it’s not being graded by one’s English teacher.

 

Before I go any further, I do not claim to be an expert on the English language and I am not a perfect writer myself. I did not major in English. To be honest, I found most of my high school English classes to be quite a drag, but I still got through them and I did pick up some valuable lessons from this education that I have carried with me ever since.

 

I know we are all prone to imperfections in our writing. Writing is a complex art with many rules and standards that one is expected to adhere to. Some of the rules are difficult to remember or to understand, and not everyone can even agree on what is proper and what isn’t. Some people, for example, might balk at my use of a preposition at the end of one of my preceding sentences. I could have written the sentence to read as follows: Writing is a complex art with many rules and standards to which one is expected to adhere. Some people might see such a construction as being stilted or that the writer is being a pompous elitist.

 

Let’s face it, as a language, English is a pain in the ass to master. Much of the language is built on other languages, each of which has its own rules of grammar and syntax. Since kids all around the world have to learn it as a foreign language it must suck trying to keep track of all the inconsistencies within the language.

 

The examples that I am going to list, however, are hardly of the nitpicking variety. These are problems that I consider to be woefully substandard to the fundamentals of writing. These are not listed in any particular order. They are simply items that I have compiled in an ongoing list as they come up in the writing that I see each week:

 

Capitalization of I

 

This is the one I see the most, so it’s first on the list. All too often I see people not capitalize the letter I when referring to the first-person perspective. For Christ's sake, people, I think this convention of English writing was covered in first grade if not second grade, third grade at the very latest. I blame the prevalence of instant messaging and texting for contributing to fostering this poor writing habit.

 

Use of “chatspeak”

 

Here’s another one where I suspect texting is the culprit behind its prevalence. One of the reasons I vastly prefer email to instant messaging is the fact that so many people tend to write in abbreviated shorthand, which I find to be highly jarring to my nerves and difficult to read, such as shit like this: hi how r u im gr8 lol c u l8r ttfn. Please, for the love of God, could someone just hand me an ice pick so I can gouge my eyes out now? Such woefully substandard writing does NOT belong in a story!

 

Consistency with first- person and third-person perspectives

 

If your story starts out as being written from the perspective of the narrator, keep it that way! Don’t start out saying “I was put in diapers for wetting the bed” in one paragraph and then later on write, “David’s diaper punishment continued indefinitely” if David is the character that was speaking about himself in the beginning.

 

Consistency with past tense and present tense

 

This one is largely related to the item above. In general most stories should be written as past tense, but some writers choose to use present tense. That’s fine, but if you do, don’t change to past tense halfway through! Example:

 

Mom checks my diapers every morning and when I am wet and poopy she calls my sister Laura to put me into clean diapers. Laura winces at the smell but she is used to it. She removed the soiled diapers and put several clean diapers on me. She doesn’t put my pants on but I didn’t ever wear them anyway.

 

Misuse of spell check

 

Spelling checkers are a wonderful thing. They aren’t perfect, but they do catch a lot of mistakes that might otherwise go unnoticed. Like any tool, spelling checkers need to be used properly. When you use spell check and a word is flagged for correction, don’t always just choose the first word in the list! Oftentimes the correct word will not be the first one! To do this just makes for some hideously bad writing that is an incredible pain in the ass to edit, because as far as the spell check is concerned, it’s right. The grammar checker may detect contextual or syntactical errors when the wrong word is selected, but most of the time the only way I can ferret out these mistakes is to go through the story with a fine-toothed comb.

 

Paragraph breaks

 

Paragraphs serve two purposes; they improve readability and they provide breaks where there is a change in action, time or other shifts in the flow of the content. What I hate is when someone sends me a long block of text with no paragraph breaks whatsoever. It becomes doubly annoying when a quotation from a speaker is not offset by a paragraph break, and when the quoted passages of two or more characters are run together without breaks, it makes it difficult to determine who the hell is doing the talking.

 

Proper use of quotation marks

 

To denote that someone is speaking, quotation marks should be used to frame the speaker’s words. I really don’t feel like I should belabor this point by explaining how it should be done since this should be fundamentally understood by the time one is in junior high school. Instead I will provide an example of what I often see:

 

Mom said you need to get your diapers changed because you stink, so I went up to Cathy and she said I was smelly.

 

This is how it should appear:

 

Mom said, “You need to get your diapers changed because you stink,” so I went up to Cathy and she said I was smelly.

 

Since Cathy’s quote is indirect, it needs no quotes, but if the sentence had read she said, “You are smelly,” then quotation marks would be required since these are the actual words spoken by Cathy.

 

Remember, too, unless the sentence itself ends at the end of the quote, use a comma in place of the period in the quote, and for God’s sake, put the damn comma on the inside of the quote! Examples:

 

• Wrong: “You’d better take more diapers than that.” my mother advised me. [quote ends in period]
• Wrong: “You’d better take more diapers than that”, my mother advised me. [comma appears on outside of quotation]
• Wrong: “You’d better take more diapers than that” my mother advised me. [comma omitted altogether]
• Correct: “You’d better take more diapers than that,” my mother advised me.

 

Half-quotations

 

I don’t know what else to call this, but here’s an example:

 

It was getting late, so Mom said to get to bed because you have a big day tomorrow.

 

What’s wrong here is that the quote begins as an indirect quotation but ends with what should be a direct quote. This is the kind of thing that makes my head explode (figuratively speaking, of course, but you get the idea). There are three ways to go about correcting this construction.

 

• Write the whole thing as an indirect quote: It was getting late, so Mom said to get to bed because I have a big day tomorrow.
• Write the whole thing as a direct quote: It was getting late, so Mom said, “Get to bed because you have a big day tomorrow.”
• Keep it as is, but offset the direct quote with quotation marks: It was getting late, so Mom said to get to bed “because you have a big day tomorrow.”

 

I really don’t like employing the third method, but oftentimes out of haste or impatience I will do this when editing a story. A lot of examples of this kind of writing aren’t quite so clear as what I provided, so the third method is usually the quickest remedy.

 

The only time I advocate the type of construction in the third example is when the quoted portion is for emphasis. Example:

 

My dad said to carry the pepper spray with me, “Because Mr. Brown’s dog will try to bite your balls off.”

 

Quoting a Dialogue

 

When two or more characters are speaking it is imperative that each character’s spoken words are clearly delineated from each other; otherwise it becomes a jumbled mess and the reader will have no idea who the hell is saying what to whom! Jesus! Here is an actual example:

 

OK baby you are all done. Baby I am not a baby, yes you are babys wet there pants and have to wear diapers so yeah you’re a little baby the nurse replied with a smirk on her face.

 

Aside from all the other fuckups in this piece (copied as submitted with no editing), this example illustrates how painful it is when the reader (that would be yours truly) has to parse the quoted pieces. Here is the corrected version:

 

“Okay, baby, you are all done.”

 

“Baby? I am not a baby!”

 

“Yes, you are. Babies wet their pants and have to wear diapers, so yeah, you’re a little baby,” the nurse replied with a smirk on her face.

 

See how much easier that is to read?

 

Using periods to end a sentence

 

Again, it seems that this item was covered very early on in my schooling and it should be readily understood that you end most sentences with a period (sometimes an exclamation point or a question mark where appropriate). The default is the period. Without periods, there is no way to discern where one sentence ends and the next one begins. Example:

 

I woke up to the feel and smell of wearing wet and poopy diapers as my sister came into my bedroom to remind me of my stinky condition she told me to get on the floor so that she could change my diapers.

 

I cannot tell if the next sentence begins with “As my sister…” or if this is still part of the first sentence, with the second sentence being, “She told me to get on the floor…”

 

Oh, and while I am thinking about it, remember to use periods, not commas, to end a sentence.

 

Run-on sentences

 

Conjunctions, such as “and” are useful for joining together short sentence fragments, but at the same time, there comes a limit to how many segments should be joined in one sentence. Here’s an example of a run-on sentence:

 

I woke up and I realized my diapers were wet and then my sister came in and she said I smell bad and so she changed my diapers and she left my room and then called me out and we had breakfast.

 

This could be re-written as follows:

 

I woke up and I realized my diapers were wet. My sister then came in and she said I smell bad, so she changed my diapers. She left my room and then called me out to have breakfast.

 

Unnecessary capitalization

 

There are too many rules for what words are to be capitalized and which ones are left alone, so I will leave it to you to seek this information. I’m just pointing out that most common nouns, verbs and adjectives do not need to be capitalized if they are not used at the beginning of a sentence or a direct quotation.

 

Uncapitalized names

 

Really, I would expect most people to know that people’s names are capitalized. Unfortunately, too many stories demonstrate this flaw which should not require further explanation. Next item!

 

Apostrophes

 

Holy shit, where do I start with this one? Apostrophes are in a category of their own because there are so many ways people misuse them. First off, apostrophes are not used to denote pluralization. This is sometimes called “the grocer’s apostrophe” because you will sometimes see hand-lettered signs that say, “Watermelon’s xx¢/lb.” Apostrophes denote possession, so you would write “John’s diapers”, but not “Johns diaper’s”. I won’t get into how to place a possessive apostrophe on words that end in s since is a stylistic issue on which there seems to be no consensus (e.g. Russ’ diapers/Russ’s diapers).

 

Apostrophes are also used in contractions. That means that words like don’t, can’t, shouldn’t, etc. all need an apostrophe (it goes between the n and the t, while we’re on the subject), as they are contractions of do not, can not, and should not, respectively. It’s okay to say, “Jimmy’s going to get his diapers changed” since “Jimmy’s” is a contraction of “Jimmy is.”

 

A grating example of apostrophe abuse (by omission) I see too often is “Im” (or worse, “im”, two errors for the price of one; just get me a gun already!) People, there is an apostrophe that belongs in there! It means “I am”, as in “I’m (I am) getting goddamn sick of seeing people write ‘Im’!” Im isn’t even a word! Well, maybe it’s sort of a word, I guess, for “instant messaging”, but if that’s the case, then it should be written as IM (capitalized). Until and unless the language evolves to accept it as a common word, the jury is still out on this one as far as I am concerned. In any case, even if “im” eventually becomes a valid word, as “email” has, its inclusion in the dictionary does not change the need for an apostrophe when writing I’m. If anything, the apostrophe will become even more important.

 

One area that causes a lot of confusion with regards to the use of the apostrophe is differentiating the words its and it’s because their proper usage goes against intuition:

 

• Its (no apostrophe) is the possessive form of a gender neutral pronoun. Since the word is possessive, a lot of people probably think it should have an apostrophe, but it doesn’t. A proper example is:
  I looked at my brother’s diaper and noticed its whiteness is becoming more dingy.

 

• It’s (apostrophe) is a contraction of “it is”. Here is how it’s is properly used:
  I looked at my brother’s diaper and noticed it’s losing its whiteness.

 

A similar problem occurs with confusion between whose and who’s:

 

• Whose (no apostrophe) is the possessive form of asking whom something belongs to:
  Whose diapers are those? [To whom do those diapers belong?]
• Who’s is the contraction of “who is”:
  Sheila knows who’s [who is] going to wind up in diapers because of his pooping accidents.

 

“Well, Now, Anyway, You See…”

 

In written pieces very rarely if ever is it necessary to begin a sentence with “Well”. In fact, unless someone is being quoted, or the overall piece is intended to carry an informal tone, I can’t think of a single instance where this word is even needed. In virtually all narratives (most often seen in True Accounts), starting a sentence with “Well” is superfluous, so I just delete every instance of the word used in this sense. Too often I see stories that look like this:

 

Well, it all started when I was six years old…

 

I can (and I do) remove the word “Well” without changing the meaning of the sentence one iota. Its cousins, “Now” and “Anyway”, are just as grating, such as in, “Now, this is when my mom brought out the diapers…” A less common but equally brain-rasping phrase is “You see”, as in, “You see, mom didn’t like us boys wetting our beds every night…”

 

It’s even worse when the writer continues to start his sentences with “Well” throughout the whole damn piece.

 

“Til”

 

I’m not going to spend much time on this one because it’s so ridiculously simple! Examples:

 

• Wrong: “I had to stay in my wet and poopy diapers til my sister came home from school to change me.”
• Correct: “I had to stay in my wet and poopy diapers until my sister came home from school to change me.”

 

“Okay”

 

This one isn’t a real biggie, but it warrants some attention. While Word’s spell checker accepts “ok”, it just doesn’t look right to me. In fact, it looks rather ok-ward to me. To my mind it would be pronounced “awk”. I prefer that it be written out as “okay”, or at least written in uppercase characters (OK, periods not necessary).

 

Homonyms

 

Homonyms are words that sound alike but are spelled differently and used differently. I won’t list every example there is, just the ones I get tired of having to fix: My comments appear in blue.

 

• Aisle/isle
  Aisle (passageway in a store between shelves): We went to the baby aisle to get diapers, wipes, lotion and powder.
  Isle (island): All the boys on the small isle wore diapers brought in from the nearby mainland.
• Allowed/Aloud
  Allowed (verb): He was not allowed to wear pants over his thick diapers.
  Aloud (adverb): Sheila spoke aloud about the condition of her brother’s diapers.
• Close/clothes
  Close (verb): After she put my pants in the cabinet she closed it and locked it.
  Clothes (noun): I am not allowed to wear any clothes with my diapers except for a shirt.
• Ensure/insure
  Ensure (to make sure of): Please ensure that his diapers are put on him tightly.
  Insure (to protect against risk): You need to insure your car.
• Here/hear
  Here (adverb): You will be diapered right here in the living room in front of your sisters.
  Hear (verb): I can’t play hide and seek because everyone can hear my plastic pants crinkling.
• I’ll/Ill
  I’ll (contraction of “I will”): I’ll wear diapers if I get diarrhea.
  Ill (sick): The tainted meat made him ill, so he had to wear diapers.
  Too often people omit the apostrophe, which results in misuse of the latter word.
• Loose/lose
  Loose (adjective): Bobby’s diapers were too loose, so his sister Mandy tightened them up.
  Lose (verb): Jeffrey is going to lose control of his bowels from wearing diapers for so long.
  I realize this example, like I’ll and ill, isn’t really an example of a homonym since “lose” is pronounced as “looz” and “loose” is pronounced with a hard s.
• New/Knew
  New (adjective): Those are his new diapers.
  Knew (past tense of “know”): I knew he was going to get put into diapers.
• Since/sense
  Since (preposition) He has been in diapers nonstop since birth; (adverb) He failed toilet training and has since been in diapers; (conjunction) He has been in diapers since he was having pooping accidents.
  Sense (noun or verb, meaning physical faculty): Her strong sense of smell alerted her to the condition of her brother’s diapers. She sensed a poopy odor coming from his butt.
  There/they’re/their
  There (adverb): His diapers are over there.
  They’re (contraction for “they are”): Dennis got some new diapers today; they’re very white.
  Their (plural possessive): Sandra, have your brothers had their diapers changed today?
• Through/threw
  Through (preposition): She saw the boy in his diapers through his bedroom window.
  Threw (verb, past tense of throw): Because he would no longer be wearing them, his mother threw his soiled pants away.
• Two/too/to
  Two (number): Even though he is only wearing two diapers, they are very thick.
  Too (adverb): No boy is too old for diapers. Billy is wearing diapers, too.
  To (preposition): Ellen went to the store to buy diapers for her brother William.
• Where/wear/were/we’re
  Where (adverb): Where can I get cloth diapers for an eight-year-old boy?
  Wear (verb): Her eight-year-old brother wears cloth diapers.
  Were (past tense of “are”): The boys were kept in diapers indefinitely
  We’re (contraction of “we are”): We’re going to the store for more diapers.
• Your/you’re
  Your (possessive pronoun): Your new diapers arrived today.
  You’re (contraction of “you are”): Because you wet the bed last night you’re going to wear diapers from now on.
  There is also a word “yore”, which means “of old”, as in “days of yore”, but this is a poetic, literary word that I would not expect to see in a diaper story (used properly, of course).

 

Lay and Lie

 

Because of its complexity, this one gets a heading all its own. I’ll admit that I have been corrected on this one myself, and it’s because it’s so damn confusing and counterintuitive! It must be hell for someone learning English as a second language to try keeping this one straight. First off, one needs to understand the difference between a transitive verb and an intransitive verb (see Wikipedia links below). In short, a transitive verb requires a direct object (diapers in this case), whereas an intransitive verb does not have a direct object. The examples below should help illustrate the difference.

 

	Transitive verb	Intransitive verb
Present tense	Mindy lays her brother’s diapers on the bed.	Bobby lies down for his diaper change.
Past tense	Mindy laid her brother’s diapers on the bed.	Bobby lay down for his diaper change.
Past participle	Mindy has/had laid her brother’s diapers on the bed.	Bobby has/had lain down for his diaper change.

 

Affect and Effect

 

This one also gets special treatment because of the vaguely understood distinctions and the resulting confusion between the two.

 

Affect (verb): to act upon or have an effect on somebody or something. Example:

 

His diaper rash affected his skin.

 

Effect (noun): a change or changed state occurring as a direct result of action by somebody or something else. Example:

 

Wearing diapers to school had an effect on his self-esteem.

 

This sentence could also be written as:

 

Wearing diapers to school affected his self-esteem.

 

The confusion between the two is very understandable. Just to add to the confusion, effect can also be used as a verb, though it isn’t as common. In its verb form (a transitive verb), effect means to produce as an effect, as in:

 

Wearing his diapers to school effected a change in his self-esteem.

 

I know the distinctions are about as clear as mud, but I hope this helps a little.

 

This is by no means a complete list, which is why I expect to update it periodically. Some of you may be afraid to submit a story lest I rip you a new asshole. I won’t. If I decide your story is too error-laden to be worth my time to fix it then I simply won’t post it. Just don’t do what Kurt Bassett did and send me dozens of copies of the same piece of crap week after week after week in hopes that I will eventually post it. Then I will rip you a new one.

 

“Gonna” and other Informalisms

 

I don’t know if this is the right word to describe this, but when I see phrases like “going to” written as “gonna”, it plays a dissonant chord in the music of the writing, so to speak. If a character is speaking and is being quoted I’ll let this one pass, but in a narrative, please, just please write it properly!

 

“Alright”

 

 

Some of you might think I am being too picky and getting too worked up over what would seem to be very trivial matters. In occasional, isolated instances I can handle it, but when you see the same stupid shit week after week repeated over and over from several different people who seem to know absolute fuck-all about the basics of writing, it can really wear on one’s nerves after awhile. It’s okay if I have to make a few corrections here and there, but some stories are badly riddled with dozens of different types of errors. I have to make literally hundreds of edits within three or four pages; yes, they are that bad! Not a single line or sentence passes muster untouched and the tedious, constant editing and correcting the same little things over and over is downright maddening (e.g. every instance of the word “off” is written “of” throughout the whole story, where spell check or find/replace-all will do no good). It’s the difference between enduring a single ant bite and stepping in an anthill and being covered with thousands of those red little bastards. I have to wonder what the suicide rate is among English teachers. On the other hand, at least they get the satisfaction of giving students who submit crappy writing an F and they get to make all kinds of red marks to point out just how piss-poor shitty their writing really is. Maybe I should start grading stories (just kidding, I’d feel like a dick for doing this).

 

Really, I will try my best to correct the most egregious of errors in order to make your story readable and enjoyable, and I won’t call you out on your errors unless you’re Kurt Bassett. Still, I do kindly ask that you have the courtesy of making my job easy and take some time to put care into your writing. If you’re in doubt about something, the web is full of resources to assist you with your writing. Use these resources to better your skills and to increase the likelihood that your story will be accepted on this web site.

 

 

Updated: November 2, 2008

Originally posted October 26, 2008