Writing Skills from Culture Man

By Guy Cook

Guy Cook planned to spend a couple of weeks documenting grammar and writing tips acquired while completing his first novel. A year later, the result is this comprehensive and engaging guide. Geeky at times, light-hearted and informative, it traverses the landscape of style and writing guides, and attempts to resolve their ambiguities. A cast of dogs and squirrels help with the examples.

Subjects covered include hyphens, commas, dashes, speech and quotations, parts of speech, literary devices and the basics of good writing—plus much else.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guy Cook
• Release date: Jun 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463218112

Guy Cook

I was born and grew up in the county of Somerset, England. After studying mathematical physics at University, I've moved through a number of jobs including seismic exploration, software programming, project and bid management. I live near Winchester and enjoy sports, including tennis, cycling and mountain climbing.My first published work was a short story, The Overarm Dog, about a dog learning the front crawl. I followed this with the novel Culture Man, an adventure set in Winchester. I spent much of 2019 writing what turned out to be a 200-page blog article on writing and have turned this into a free book on Smashwords. I've learnt – hopefully – lots from the experience and will be writing more fiction this year.

Book preview

Writing Skills from Culture Man

By Guy Cook

Copyright 2020 Guy Cook

Smashwords Edition

Thank you for downloading this ebook. Although free, the book is the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed the book, please encourage your friends and colleagues to download their own copy.

Cover Illustration Copyright 2020 Molly Chambers

Flying Man image courtesy of Nick Thomas

Table of Contents

Summary

Style and Consistency

British and American English (and Australian & others)

Dictionaries

Parts of Speech

Hyphens

Commas

Numbers, Dates and Times

Tenses

Colons, Semi-colons and Dashes

Quotations and Direct Speech

Ellipses for pausing and trailing off

Ellipses for omitted text and (briefly) citations

Interior Monologue (thoughts) and Points of View

Quotes and Italics

Miscellaneous

Literary Devices and Plot Types

Good Writing

About the Author

Summary

Preliminary note: This is the book version of a long post published on my blog site. I created the book so that people can read it offline and in their preferred format. Apart from differences in format, the two versions are identical. As such, this book will look blog-like in places, and I frequently call it a blog. I’ve made every effort to edit it with the time, care and attention due a book—even so, writing about writing leaves me a hostage to fortune!

The start proper: While writing Culture Man, I found many points of grammar and style I repeatedly had to check. For example, should book or song titles be italicised, is there a comma before which, what are the rules around hyphens, what tense should be used for flashbacks or thought, and—just for kicks—what on earth is the subjunctive? This blog gives a guide to the issues I most frequently found myself looking up, plus some diversions along the way. To be honest, I found this fascinating and took far more time and strayed into far more areas than I intended. The article has ended up long enough that you probably won’t want to read it all in one sitting—or even ten! Although my rationale is to talk about fiction, the content largely applies to all types of writing, and I try to indicate where other types of writing follow different guidelines or nuances. This is not intended as a prescriptive do it like this manual but as a survey of sometimes conflicting guidelines, mixed with my own thoughts and conclusions. Many of the examples relate to dogs and squirrels, for no overriding reason. Here we go:

Style and Consistency

Often the correct expression is not a matter of grammar but of style or established guidelines. A newspaper or publishing house is likely to define a house style, either by using a well-known publication or by writing their own guide. These include grammar rules, especially the more subtle ones, but also a host of guidance such as when to spell out numbers and whether it should be Nato or NATO. Examples of traditional style guides are the US publications The Chicago Manual of Style (which I’ll refer to as Chicago hereafter) and the AP Stylebook (AP), and the UK’s New Oxford Style Manual. Chicago and AP are both available as online subscriptions and in book form, while the Oxford manual can be purchased as a hardback. Chicago offers a free one-month trial and an annual subscription of $39 at the time of writing; AP also offers a free trial and is a bit cheaper.

Chicago was first published in 1906, AP in 1953, and the Oxford version has been going in one form or another since 1893. They all have nigh on 1,000 pages. Chicago is the indispensable reference for writers, editors, proofreaders, indexers, copywriters, designers, and publishers. The Oxford guide’s topics include how to punctuate and hyphenate accurately, how to use quotations and citations clearly, UK and US usage, and much more.  The AP’s full name is The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefings on Media Law; it was created for the Associated Press news agency and sold as a guide for reporters. These are serious tomes and you could answer most of your questions from any one of these (except you’d need to read it). I find Chicago is very well written and covers almost anything you can think of. Occasionally I disagree with it, but a more fundamental reason for suggesting you don’t adopt it wholesale—which many publishers do—is that it can lead to a "What does Chicago say?" attitude, as opposed to thinking about what works best or how language is used or is changing. However, if you have a publisher or employer who mandates a particular style guide, you’ll have to go with it. Examples of organisation-written guides are the University of Oxford Style Guide, the Telegraph Style Book and the Guardian and Observer style guide.

The most important thing is often to be consistent. If sometimes it’s 8:00 p.m. and others 9 am, one page says the professor and another the Professor, and dog-house gets mingled with doghouse, then it can be jarring. Within limits, being consistently wrong is better than to be inconsistent. At times, the rules or guidelines are contradictory, ambiguous or allow two different options. In this case, the strategy is to pick one and stick with it—this could be from a standard style guide that you adopt as your house guide or from notes that you diligently write up. This blog acts as my style guide—although it doesn’t cover everything, and I still use Google.

British and American English (and Australian & others)

English spread from Britain through colonisation and trading and has subsequently diverged in minor ways. Hence we have British English and American English, which vary in areas such as spelling, pronunciation, idioms, grammar (to a small degree) and formatting of dates and numbers. The similarities vastly outnumber the differences, but enough differences exist such that separate dictionaries exist for each. The ubiquity of American and (to an extent) British films and TV means that most people are familiar with the common spoken differences. Australian, New Zealand, Irish and Canadian English all contain their own unique aspects and their own dictionaries, but generally Australian, New Zealand and Irish English are close to the British version and Canadian is probably somewhere in between.

There are many countries with English as either their first language or their official language, such as Barbados or Guyana; and a further set of countries with English as an official language (e.g., used in courts and higher education instruction), such as India or Singapore. Many or most are Commonwealth countries, which are likely close to British English but with all kinds of their own variations. See Wikipedia: English-speaking territories for details. Finally, lots of countries use English as a second language, and it’s the international language of business. English-speaking authors are lucky to have such a global market!

As a writer you’ll normally use the English of your nationality unless there’s a market-based reason not to. The main differences are in spelling and some words and idioms that are used, so there shouldn’t be many problems that a dictionary won’t solve. If you introduce a character of a different English-speaking nationality, then having them speak the local flavour gives authenticity. However, it’s advisable not to sink into caricature and introduce an Australian with first words of G’day mate. Pass the tinnie. Ripper. We haven’t even mentioned the multiple internal dialects within countries, such as Yorkshire or Southern American; or in countries within states, such as Welsh or Scottish. The guidance for an author is not to overdo strong dialect or it can become impenetrable. Typically, you might start with a character speaking in dialect, but revert to standard speech, perhaps with occasional lapses at times of stress or emotion. You could experiment with a character referring to a strong accent, which might add humour if you haven’t been writing a strong accent: What time is it?; I can’t understand a word of your Hampshire accent. I’ve never tried this. Having said that, some famous and acclaimed books have used dialect extensively, such as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments or the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (in the latter case, the character slips in and out of dialect to make a point). Let’s finish with a quick sample of some of the British-American differences:

Spelling

For a comprehensive list see Wikipedia: American and British English spelling differences, but here’s a smattering of the more common ones:

• Many British words ending in our are spelt or in American English, for example, humour, colour and labour become humor, color and labor.

• British words ending in re often change to end er in the American variant, for example, centre, fibre and litre become center, fiber and liter.

• British words ending in ise or derivations of them, such as organise, organisation or realise are usually spelt with ize in American English. However, the ize spelling is often an acceptable (although less used) British alternative.

• A final l is more likely to be doubled in British English when a suffix starting with a vowel is added, for example, travelling (British) or traveling (American).

• There are differences in hyphenation, with American English less likely to hyphenate with prefixes (e.g., preempt as opposed to pre-empt).

Different words for the same thing and different meanings of the same word

Common examples of separate names are the US words sidewalk, gas, drugstore or zip code in place of the British pavement, petrol, chemist or postcode. Another example is that the US doesn’t tend to have a ground floor—the street-level floor of a building is the first floor, whereas it’s the ground floor in the UK. Words can also mean different things, for example, jock is slang for a Scotsman in the UK, but slang for a college athlete in the US. See Wikipedia : List of words having different meanings in US and UK English for more examples.

Different grammar

There are some grammatical differences, but most are subtle and a matter of degree, with one construction being more common in the American than British English. A concrete example is collective nouns: in British English, these can take singular or plural verbs depending on whether the emphasis is on the body as a whole or on the individual members, so you say the team was outplayed, but the herd were scattered across the field. In American English, a singular verb is used (the herd was scattered). We discuss collective nouns further in the Miscellaneous section. For more grammatical examples, check Wikipedia: American and British English grammatical differences.

Idioms

Some idioms are common in both versions (bite the bullet); some are subtly different in each language (a pinch of salt in the UK or a grain of salt in the US); and some are likely to meet incomprehension the other side of the pond, for example ,Bob’s your uncle in the UK or shoot the breeze or bought the farm in the US. Bought the farm means someone has died, but what if they really had bought a farm? Anyway….

Date formats

The US is unusual in writing numeric dates as mm/dd/yyyy. For example, the US Declaration of Independence was pronounced in Philadelphia on 07/04/1776; most countries, including the UK, would write 04/07/1776. When written in expanded form this becomes July 4, 1776 (US) or 4 July 1776 (UK). In dialogue, the British tend to say, for example, the sixth of June (although June the sixth is used). Americans usually say June the sixth or just June sixth, although they make an exception for the Fourth of July holiday, which is a proper noun. This explains why we had the 1989 US film Born on the Fourth of July (and not Born on July Fourth).

Dictionaries

Popular free online dictionaries include the Oxford Living Dictionaries, Collins Dictionary and Merriam-Webster. Oxford Living Dictionaries is the brand name of OxfordDictionaries.com, previously called Oxford Dictionaries Online, and includes British and American dictionaries, a thesaurus and a grammar guide. It’s not the same as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which is a huge work containing the meaning, history and pronunciation of 600,000 words from a thousand years of history of the English-speaking world. The print version is 20 volumes and the online version—which is here—requires a subscription. They’re both published by Oxford University Press, which is the largest university press in the world, was founded around the 1580s (amazingly) and started work on the OED in 1854.

As well as these online versions, Oxford University Press also publish a range of print dictionaries, including The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (twelfth edition), which is used by the United Nations as its authority for English-language spelling. Collins dictionary is in its thirteenth edition and published by HarperCollins, who’ve been publishing dictionaries since 1819 (when they were called Collins). Merriam-Webster is the best-selling American English dictionary, first published in 1828.

If you regularly use an online dictionary, it makes sense to stay with one, for consistency. I prefer Collins since it has a good level of detail, tells you the American and British spellings (you need to click on the Translate button), and automatically provides the plurals. There are many other traditional dictionaries and also fascinating dictionaries of things like phrases, quotations, idioms, literary characters, etc. The world’s your oyster!

Parts of Speech

I wanted to avoid this, but it turns out to be useful and even interesting (honest). When you look up a word in a dictionary it tells you whether the word is a noun, verb, adjective, etc. Bear in mind that some words can fit more than one category, depending on context. The dictionary will give all the permutations. As well as considering types of words, I also dive into phrases and clauses, which are especially useful for the section on Commas later. I haven’t gone too deep into the grammar, but there’s still quite a lot and verbs delay us longer than I intended. To be honest, I ended up fascinated to learn about past participles, subjunctive moods, relative pronouns and the like. As such, feel free to skip much of this section—or to become as captivated as I did.

Preamble—phrases, clauses and sentences

It makes sense to define these before we start. A phrase is a logical group of words that doesn’t have a subject-verb pair and therefore can’t form a sentence on its own—it’s part of a clause or sentence—for example, the noisy dog, waiting for his bone, or in the shadow of the night. There are different types of phrases—eight according to Your Dictionary: Phrase Examples including noun phrases, verb phrases, participial phrases and prepositional phrases. These are defined according to the words that make up the phrase (e.g., a prepositional phrase starts with a preposition). You’ll also see adjectival and adverbial phrases defined—which aren’t in Your Dictionary’s list. These are defined according to their effect; that is, they act as adjectives or adverbs. Because of this, there’s some overlap, so, for example, a prepositional phrase may also be an adverbial phrase.

A clause has a subject and verb: an independent clause can form a sentence on its own, while a dependent clause can’t since it doesn’t form a complete thought. An example of an independent clause is Rover hared after the stick. A dependent clause such as because he needed the exercise needs an independent clause to create a clear meaning and sentence, such as Rover hared after the stick because he needed the exercise. There are three types of dependent clauses, which we’ll meet in due time—adverbial clauses, relative (or adjective or adjectival) clauses and noun clauses.

A sentence can be a single independent clause or an independent clause plus a combination of other clauses (independent and dependent) and phrases. A sentence always has a subject and a verb, and many sentences also have objects. A subject is the person or thing which a sentence is about, and they often perform the action of the verb. An object is the person or thing that is acted upon by the subject, and they often receive the action of the verb. For example, in Rover ate his dinner, Rover is the subject, ate is the verb and his dinner is the object. Subjects and objects are either nouns, pronouns, noun phrases or noun clauses. In more complex sentences, it can be less obvious exactly what the subject and object are, but let’s not worry too much.

Sentence fragments: Ok, I