Cadence

I've been writing a lot of short fiction recently - character studies and microplots and things from a dozen different perspectives - and one of the things that's been most interesting to work on is cadence. It's part and parcel of syntax, of course, and I've always put sentences together a little weirdly. Sometimes it'll take me a couple passes before I can get something that reads fine and concise to me to parse to anything meaningful at all to other readers.

Part of this is that I learned French as a written language before English, and narrative and dialog have always been very different creatures to me. Dialog just needs to sound like people talk, and I can do that. Narrative needs its own flow, needs to be interspersed with enough dialog, needs to convey information and move plot along without getting mired in itself.

It's the cadence of narrative that I've been working on, how quickly or slowly or trippingly different stories need to go. Re-ordering sentences in ways that do nothing to improve clarity is a new thing for me, but it's been necessary in working on cadence.

Maddeningly, I've so far not found a way to work on cadence that doesn't involve revision and paying attention. It's almost like writing is something that requires effort.

Commas, dialog, and swearing

I read a lot of free romance novels.

A lot.

We're not going to go into numbers here, because I have no idea: I delete most of them as soon as I finish, if not before. There's a reason for that!

There's a lot I'm willing to forgive in free books: medical implausibility, silly premise (I actually go out of my way for pretending-to-be-married and arranged marriage stories), slavish adherence to archetype. One thing that drives me absolutely batty, though, is absence of the addressing comma and other failures at punctuating dialog.

Thus, I present an educational short story:

"Motherfucker, where is my cheese?" asked John. John is calling for Steve's attention by addressing him. Because calling for his attention is not integral to the rest of the sentence, it gets a comma after it. 'Asked' is not capitalized because it is part of the dialog tag: it is adding context to the way the words are being said.

Steve shrugged. "Why should I know? Have you checked the fridge, asswipe?" Steve shrugging is a separate sentence before he speaks: shrugging is not a way of communicating words in spoken language, so it is not a dialog tag, just an action that occurs in the same paragraph. If I wanted only one sentence, it would begin 'Steve shrugged, saying, "Why. . .."' Asswipe is not capitalized, because it is an epithet and not a proper name.

It is not motherfucking hard, motherfuckers. There is a comma before motherfuckers because this whole post can be taken as an apostrophe to people who keep messing it up, and I like calling people names.

Feels

There are words like saudade that refer to explicit emotional states, and convey a wealth of meanings. In English, we have many and varied words for nearly everything, but we don't have anything that means the same thing as saudade. The closest we can get is nostalgia, or love for something that has gone and can never be again. They convey nearly the same thing, but not as precisely or neatly.

We have a lot of emotional vocabulary, because language is about communication, and nuance of feeling can be difficult to convey. A great deal is conveyed by facial expressions and body language.

Usually more than this. Art by http://darcybing.deviantart.com/.

Part of the emergent vocabulary Tumblr exposes me to includes the word 'feels' as a noun. Usage includes such phrases as 'all of the feels' and 'right in the feels.' A literal definition would be something like 'heart,' but this carries more of a connotation of addictive heartbreak. Something that hits one right in the feels might make one cry every time one reads it, but one revisits it often anyway. 

In which I talk about memetic density

This entire post is going to be a deconstruction of the title.

'In which' is not merely an informative phrase to indicate the contents of the post: it is a reference to the way Diane Wynne Jones, amongst others, starts chapters in her books. Each chapter title doubles as a summary of the chapter, and adds amusing context, such as "In which Sophie talks to hats" and "In which Howl expresses his feelings with green slime."

By the way, I love my roommates. I wrote this while still in Victoria, sitting in Starbucks. It had been a couple of years since I read Howl's Moving Castle, and I'd forgotten whether the introductions to the chapters were the chapter titles or separate headings. Google searches and Google Books and Amazon and Kobo were all turning up blanks: all I wanted was the first page.

Both of my roommates are bibliophiles who don't get rid of their books, so I just got on Skype and asked out of the blue whether they had a copy and asked them to check for me. Only one of them had a copy, but between them they both had a copy and knew what I was looking for and were able to answer without checking, and then able to link me to the TVTropes page discussing the wider use of the convention.

It is stylistically striking enough to stick with a reader, and allusion to it both establishes formal context and informal social context: by title this post in this way I am affirming that I read, that I read for fun, and that I retain it and consider it important to the way I interact with the world. Using descriptive titles, particularly with the 'In which' format, is language that establishes personal context as well as the explicit context inherent in a descriptive title.

Seem like a lot to try to communicate with two words?

Yeah. And I'm not done!

The title of this post is first-person. Normally, descriptive titles are presented third-person. Using first person here does a couple of things:

• Establishes that this is a meta-contextual post examining the linguistics involved in addition to participating.
• Avoids referring to myself in the third person, which is awkward at best and impenetrable and pretentious at worst.
• Let's me avoid choosing which name to refer to myself as: I go by Eileen because it is my name and using anything else in an even semi-professional setting would feel really weird. But I also answer to Chiomi, which is a nickname I've had since high school and still go by among close friends. I am also called PK in some writing contexts, as an abbreviation of phantomkitsune, the username I win stuff under in Adam's contest. On the website where I am known as PK, I've made several contacts with people who've become good friends and with whom I discuss writing a great deal. Using first person lets me bypass that issue completely.

Now to the verb. I used 'talk' as opposed to 'discuss' or 'write' because, given the dearth of comments here and the fact that I'm mostly unpacking a sentence, discussion does not seem a sure thing. 'Write' I discarded because the tone I use in my blog is a lot closer to the tone I use in casual speech than what I would use in an essay. Pontificate, which would have served just as well, was discarded because of reasons.

The preposition, I feel, is reasonably straightforward and does not require exposition.

Memetic density has to be addressed as a compound to make sense. A meme is a unit of culture. For example, I have an extremely pedantic coworker, through whose influence all of us who work with him have become more linguistically precise. I have on more than one occasion called him a memetic disease because of this effect. So memetic density is how many ideas are communicated by a word or phrase. Memetic density and the effectiveness thereof is, fairly obviously, culture-dependent. I was able to understand a fair number of the references in Terry Pratchett's Soul Music because my dad introduced me to classic rock. If I didn't have that context, I would be missing a lot of the references in the book. The memetic density would be lost. Knowyourmeme.com is one of the best resources for making sure that modern references aren't lost, because it catalogs widespread memes.

As this entire post suggests, a lot of meaning can be conveyed in a few context-specific words. It's just a matter of knowing the context.

Note: thoughts like this are why it takes me forever to finish many of my writing projects.

Half Price Chocolate Day

Today is one of two iterations of my favourite holiday of the year: Half Price Chocolate Day. The other is November first. Apparently there are other holidays preceding these two days, for which people pay full price for chocolate. I do not understand this logic, and will comfort myself for my lack of understanding with offensive quantities of chocolate for which I paid very little money.

Oh, right, I also have a guest post up on my friend Patrick Thunstrom's blog. It's about linguistics and word choice again, since that's one of my favourite topics. If you like that sort of rambling, you should also check out Speaking Human, the irregularly-updating sociology, linguistics and signalling blog I contribute to.

Tumblr is something I've been getting more involved in recently, though my initial impressions of it still stand: it's much more functional as a tool for connecting and getting involved in a community than it is as a tool for sending forth material into the world. Blogger's archives are significantly more easily navigable unless you are tracking a specific tag on a specific tumblr. Once you're caught up, though, I find Tumblr's dashboard much nicer than Blogger's Reading List. This could be simply because the only time I look at the Reading List is when I'm on Blogger's back end, instead of on Google Reader.

They are definitely different modes of communication. If you're thinking about starting your own, or an additional, blog, I'd recommend examining your goals and your style as well as all the options out there.