Empower your writing by dumping 'feel'

There are certain words in the English language that allow writers to be lazy and end up as traps for some of us. One of my biggest offenders seems to be the word 'felt.' It's a tricky word in that it seems like it's a show type of word when you think of the sentence "Anna felt the heat of the fire." And it is better than "The fire was hot." But there is an even better way to write this.


If you say "Anna felt the heat of the fire." we get the image, but it feels removed. Felt seems to serve as a filter that bars us from the character and ironically (Yes, I think this is actually an appropriate use of the word irony), does not allow us to get a good grasp of what the character actually felt. The main reason for this is that it put's Anna as the subject of the sentence even though she does not really do anything aside from passively observe. Plus, by removing that word, it forces you as a writers to become more creative in your descriptions, and that's a mega win.


So going back to our example sentence, I removed 'felt' and had to figure out what the fire was actually doing. So since we'll say the character is standing, the heat is going to originate from the ground (assuming this is not some massive conflagration) and heats up her lower back first, making its way to her upper back. So the feeling is moving upwards, and motion is a good thing because it's active.


The next question is what do I do with the motion? I suppose I could go and use the typical phrase 'ran' as in "The heat of the fire ran up Anna's back" That's good because now instead of Anna being the subject, 'The heat of the fire' is, and it is actively doing something instead of our passive Anna.


Still, I feel (pun intended) there has to be a better word than 'ran.' Since I want to keep this simple, I'm just going to throw a yummier verb in there instead of going all metaphors and such and say "The heat of the fire crept up Anna's back." Not perfect, but for this little blog post, I think you get the idea.


So for a recap:


"The fire was hot." = Bad.
"Anna felt the heat of the fire." = Meh at best.
"The heat of the fire ran up Anna's back." = Alright.
"The heat of the fire crept up Anna's back." = Good.

"The waves of heat radiating from the fire ducked under Anna's shirt and slowly crept up her back like a pack of ninjas closing in on their target." = Well I just went and ran with this...not perfect but you get the point.


'Felt sentences' may be better than 'was' sentences, but come on, you can do better.




Please let me know if you have any better suggestions for the sentence...and can you beat my super awesome ninjas metaphor???

Just what is a passive sentence?

Aside from “don’t use adverbs.” the biggest advice it seems that young writers are given is “don’t use the passive voice.” The problem is that, unlike adverbs, the passive voice can be a bit fuzzy.

The basic definition is to have the verb in front of the subject. These forms are easy to see and identify such as the example below.

1) The dishes were washed by John.

In that example, John is obviously the subject, washed is the verb, and the dishes are the direct object. But there are other types of passive construction that can be more difficult to spot. Take the example below.

2) I was punched by a bully.

Here, the noun ‘I’ is the first word of the sentence, but if you look carefully, it’s not the subject. ‘a bully’ is the subject. Additionally, the subject can even be implied, making it far more difficult to identify.

3) I was punched in the nose.

Yes, this is passive because of the implied subject. ‘I’ does not do the action of punching, and that is why it can’t be the subject and thus it becomes passive. (Note, the subject could be ‘by somebody’ and it would come right after the verb, punched.)

Now this is where things can get really fuzzy. You can have a subject that sorta does some of the action in combination with another subject that would still be passive, but it’s a little more vague.

4) Alex got elected to county examiner.

Here, Alex does some of the action, and he is first. But the other subject would be ‘by the people’ and that would come after elected. Here, Alex is more involved, but there is still a subject after the verb. This is called a ‘reflexive passive’.

The next example I have seen is generally regarded as a ‘pseudo-passive’ because we are about to cross the line where the noun before the verb is more active than before, but there is still another entity doing action.

5) My family had our apartment checked for bugs.

The family does not check for bugs, but they actively caused the checking of the bugs by having somebody else do it. This is called a ‘causative passive.’ And this become more and more pseudo the more active the subject becomes such as the example below.

6) My family got somebody in to check for bugs.

Some people might even debate whether that is even passive at all, but we could all agree that this is very close to the line.

Now that we’ve established what is and isn’t really passive, what about sentences that have ‘was’ in them? I’ve seen a lot of people in critique groups call sentences that had the word ‘was’ in them passive for no other reason than the word was there. But is it?

Probably not.

“I was walking” is not passive. It is a tense called ‘past progressive.’ Now if somebody keeps using that tense, there might be something else going on in their writing, but it does not mean it is passive.

Hopefully that cleared things up for a lot of people, and hopefully I got the grammar all right.

Keep writing!

When to End your Paragraph

How and when to end a paragraph is something I don’t often see written about, and honestly I’m not quite sure myself on this topic. Hopefully I will help understand myself, how and why I end a paragraph by the end of this post. But in my opinion, the purpose of a paragraph is to convey a full series of interconnected thoughts. But that is pretty vague…so I’ll need a paragraph or two to fully convey my point.

First I’d like to start out with the word. The most fundamental building block of language is the word. (aside from letters, but they all exist on your keyboard already…words, not so much.) Words make up sentences, which make up paragraphs, which make up chapters, books, trilogies…etc. They express an idea, one simple, single, abstract thought. A word will make the reader picture something in their minds or generate an emotion, all depending on the person. Really though, a single word does not have much power over a general audience without context.

Words are given context in phrases. phrases allow for an entire single thought to be conveyed. That’s it. Just one. You can’t write a phrase that focuses on two different ideas. For instance, to convey the thoughts that Mary has a blue dress and that she goes to school, you need two phrases. (I’m pretty sure. If there is a grammar expert out there that thinks I’m wrong, please correct me.) I know you’re thinking “Mary wore a blue dress to school.” might disprove that point, but the main focus is that she goes to school; blue is just a modifier.

Sentences now, they are made up of phrases. (A sentence can be a single phrase, which can also be a single word, or many.) A sentence contains a full, complete, thought. So “Mary wore a blue dress, and she went to school.” takes the full idea of Mary going to school with a blue dress and packages it into a single unit, making neither the blue dress, or going to school irrelevant. That is what I think a sentence is in a nutshell.

And how here we finally get to the paragraph: it should contain a more complex idea, for instance a description of a room; and you could write a full and rich room description in a single sentence; but doing so over and over again, will tire the reader and make pacing difficult; and this is where the paragraph comes in, taking a really long sentence and allowing you as a writer to break it up into multiples, while still keeping that idea contained in a single vessel.

So now where do you end a paragraph? You end it once you have completed your idea. My rule of thumb, is that if I can’t link the entire paragraph into a single sentence, I need to start a new paragraph. But don’t let this limit you either. There comes a point where you might have a 3 page paragraph, and while there is nothing wrong with that, it will tire your reader. At that point you might want to look at breaking it up. Where you would do that would be up to you, but I would suggest any time you have a good line, or a word that would end it with a lot of power.

And that brings me to my last point. To make your writing more effective, you want to try and end your paragraphs on a good, strong word. If you end your paragraph with a word like ‘this’ or ‘is’, there is not a lot of power. But if you end it in a word, like I did above, that is powerful, it puts a good, strong, stamp on your writing.

So hopefully this helps you, and as always I don’t proclaim to be an expert on grammar. Don’t show a teacher/professor this blog as why you can do something, but I think it’s right.

What do you think is the best place to end a paragraph?

Complex sentences–To the EXTREME

I’m currently reading Moby Dick by Herman Melville, a great peace of American literature; and I have to say that this man must have gotten paid by the semi-colon; but his pay must have also thus, as pay was sometimes done at that time from what I gather, been subtracted from each period that he used, since there seem to be sentences that go on forever.

Ok that was a little snarky nod towards Melville there, but that seems to me how a lot of people in the 19th century wrote. If you don’t believe me, I just opened up my book and found this whopper after only about a minute:

And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues–every stately or lovely emblazoning–the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of the butterflies and the butterfly cheeks of the young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all defied Nature absolutely paints like the harlot whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge–pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travelers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.

That is a monster of a 175 word sentence right there!

Now what can we learn from this? First we can tell by reading it that it’s hard to read. Granted the sentence is technically not a run-on, even though it violates the ’single breath rule’ that some people use to determine if a sentence is a run-on. In fact, a sentence can be infinitely long, as long as it’s punctuated properly. So it’s not a run-on, but wow is it complex and hard to read. So we don’t want to imitate this, but why study it?

Like a batter in baseball puts a weight on his bat to take practice swings before coming to the plate, learning how to write a sentence like Melville’s will make you more comfortable using more complex sentences in your writing. Again, I’m not advocating filling your work up with 100+ word sentences, but there is value in learning how to construct them.

So lets start de-constructing that sentence. First I’ll break the sentence apart into all the independent clauses.

And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues–every stately or lovely emblazoning–the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of the butterflies and the butterfly cheeks of the young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without;

so that all defied Nature absolutely paints like the harlot whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within;

and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge–

pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travelers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.

So as you can see there are 4 of them there. (At least that’s how I see it. I’m not a grammar junkie so it might be wrong, but that’s just how I see it.) If you read each one you will notice that it is a single complete thought. You’ll also notice that two of them end with a semi-colon, one ends with a dash, and the final one obviously ends with a period.

Why arn’t commas used? Well a comma would normally be used in a more basic complex sentence. “I went to the store, and I picked up a gallon of milk.” There are two independent clauses there: “I went to the store” and “I picked up a gallon of milk.” In that case a comma joins them well, so why did Melville use semi-colons and a dash?

He did that because the general rule of thumb is to use a semi-colon in place of a comma to join two independent clauses when commas have already been used in the independent thought. (And a dash can take the place of a semi-colon and is nothing more than a stylistic choice).

So that is an extreme example of a complex sentence, broken down into the main thoughts; and having read that, I hope that you feel confident in ratcheting up the complexity in some of the sentences in your work that feel could use it.

Hope this helps.

Also, feel free to comment if I’ve botched up any of these grammar rules. I want to make sure that this is correct as possible.

Thanks!