Today we see that multi-dimensional digressions are bad for your health.
What I gleaned about the story: A group of super heroes interrupt their high-level government negotiations to investigate a disturbance at the museum.
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Note: Like any place, it had some high points – Duke’s Smorgasbord and my favorite cathouse on 49th, for example – but overall it’s crowded, the people are rude, and it smells like a dump.
Using a hyphen surrounded by spaces is just wrong. The correct typography here is an em-dash, with no spaces. It’s not an immersion buster, but it is a sign of weak editing. And it comes in the second sentence. No WTF charged, but I’m now on alert that this book has not been edited properly.
Note: Matt – as I often call Matteo Mancini, that Dean of Superheroes you call the Promethean, just to annoy him – was there to check up on the Challenger Foundation’s property after the recent handover.
That’s a mouthful of an aside, especially because it has a second aside of it’s own folded inside. It’s all just a bit awkward for my tastes, and we’re only into the second paragraph. Again, not an immersion buster, but these minor frictions just dig a hole from which the author and story are going to have to work even harder to climb out.
Analysis: I spent way too much time trying to decide if I’d ever seen jaw muscles quiver with excitement. Tension, yes. Anger, yes. But excitement? I concluded that I hadn’t, but by then, the damage had been done, because I was worrying about the words used rather than seeing the story.
Analysis: By now I’ve gotten tired of the steady diet of minor editorial issues. In this case, it’s an adjectival phrase that hasn’t been properly hyphenated. I admit it’s an entirely petty thing to charge a full WTF for, but that’s what happens when editorial flaws get together in number. They’re like mosquitos. One you can ignore. Two you can ignore. But when they become a full-fledged swarm, it’s time to get out the flame-thrower and go to town.
Analysis: Human beings have been converted to marble on the molecular level and they’re not dead? How does that work? Which particular chunk of inanimate stone that now stands where their bodies once were is the living part?
I could live with this if the bodies had not been closely examined, but the super team has just finished conducting some kind of atomic-level micro scan of the statues, and they did not say anything like, “Ah, here is some unconverted tissue around the medulla oblongata, which might still hold their living essence.” Nope. They appear to be all stone, all the way through.
Note: “I’m not sure,” was the Promethean’s honest answer. He went on with his examination.
I wanted to bring this up, because I see this kind of thing fairly often, and I think it’s worth mentioning. Technically, this is a POV violation. The Promethean is not the narrator, so the narrator does not have access to his internal mental state. But if he doesn’t, then how does he know whether the answer was honest or not? It might not seem like much, but it raises potential problems later, because now the reader doesn’t know whether to trust the narrator or not. Sometimes he seems to be omniscient, while other times he isn’t. When information is not conveyed in some later scene, the reader starts to wonder whether it’s because the narrator doesn’t know, or whether he does, but he’s withholding it.
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The em dashes are my fault, and I accept full responsibility for not going in and replacing them with special characters.
I was a newspaper editor for 6 years, and a pretty good one, too, by many accounts. I’ve recently read from some folks that hyphenation of adjective phrases can be jarring, so I tried to dial back.A bad call on my part, and no excuse, to be sure. (Also at the paper, I was told to closely analyze commas and cut them whenever possible.)
I would like to know which reference book for editing fiction you recommend? Because I want to use this post as a learning experience and take something good away from it.
And of course I do have one point to defend. I know immersion was broken before you got an answer in-story, so it’s a moot point, but just so it’s been said: the Promethean addresses why he believes the people are still alive by the end of the chapter. An explanation is given; we don’t just leave the reader hanging on it.
That’s a good question, Shell. The definitive source that most US publishers base their in-house style on seems to be The Chicago Manual of Style, but every house has developed their own standard that deviates from it in some areas. And that’s what I currently use, when I come to blows with my editor. But the CMS is way overkill for the kind of stuff I write, and it’s so big that it’s hard to learn the whole thing if you’re not a rules fetishist. So I’m currently reviewing books on fiction editing, in the hope of selecting a simpler one to standardize on with my own editing team. I want something of manageable size, that covers all the stuff I need, but doesn’t weigh me down with a bunch of stuff I’ll never use in a million years. And once I’ve found it, I’ll want to pretty much memorize it, and have my editor do the same, because when the rules in my head don’t match the rules in hers, that’s where errors creep in, and I want to close that hole in my armor.
When I’m finished my current review of style guides and references for fiction writers, I’ll post an article here about what I chose and why.
And as for your defence of the Promethean, one criticism I’ve heard of the IOD report is that it can sometimes penalize a story for leaving things hanging this way, that were done for dramatic purposes, even though they might be explained later. And my response to that has always been: that’s why you get 3 WTFs. If the manuscript is otherwise clean, one or two dramatic teasers won’t be enough to stop the clock. But in a story where the reader’s confidence in the writer has been compromised by bad story-telling, or world-building, or even editing, they are much less likely to trust that the dangling questions will eventually be answered.
Certainly fair enough.
I agree with you on the hoard of editing books available. I was indoctrinated with the AP Style Manual and an editor who wanted everything that isn’t a quote torn apart and turned into the smallest, simplest sentence.
In my current technical writing gig, there’s a different style manual, and then the “house rules” like “semicolons are strongly discouraged.”
And it can make it difficult to figure out which is the “right” grammar book for any given circumstance. I look forward to seeing what you come up with for a recommendation in the future.
And, just to confuse things, in UK English it’s an en dash with spaces either side.