General Discussions
Novelisation: crappy
POSTED BY: BrainMissing
UPDATED: Monday, October 17, 2005 08:45
VIEWED: 19854
PAGE 6 of 6
Monday, October 17, 2005 8:45 AM
Quote:
Originally posted by Ptrope:
Two major grammatical errors in this sentence (ironic, considering it comments upon awkward sentence structure):
They weren't "major" at all. :\ Sorry, but one of the boards I visit is Godawful Fan Fiction, and you have not SEEN "major" grammar errors until you have seen the crap that gets posted to fanfiction.net.
Quote:Quote:You should have used "pitiful," an adjective, instead of "pitifully," an adverb.
His sentence structure is awkward and pitifully, reminds me of some of the stories in my Grade 12 writing class at the beginning of the year (before we'd learned anything).
The way I was schooled in English, that is acceptable in informal writing so long as there is a comma.
If she had written "sadly" instead of "pitifully", it would be the same structure, and that's perfectly good English. She merely substituted a stronger, more derogatory adverb is all.
Quote:
Also, the "reminds me" is unrelated to any noun in the preceding clause; it needs a noun or pronoun to define it.
Read it again. "His sentence structure" is the subject and is exactly what was related to the "reminds me". It needs no noun or pronoun because anyone could infer the noun or pronoun from the beginning of the sentence.
And even then, having less-than-perfect grammar doesn't mean that narrative can't strike you as stilted.
Quote:
Misspelling or simply an incorrect choice of contraction:Quote:"Writers" is plural, therefore "there's" is incorrect; it should have been "There are plenty of writers" (and maybe substitute "many" for "plenty of").
There's plenty of writers out there who are hysterically funny, and don't insult the intelligence of their readers.
I'll give you that one on "there's", but it's hardly a "major" error. Most native speakers would not have noticed, nor bothered to care about that, which strikes me as just having absorbed too much colloquial speech and subconsciously placing an incorrect (but easier to say verbally) contraction.
As for "plenty of", that is perfectly good English, it's just colloquial. :\ Therefore, that is not an error, which makes me wonder why you bothered to bring it up.
Quote:
Well, you did say you didn't make any errors ;).
She only made one error, and it's one I see native speakers doing all the time, especially since "There're" is so awkward to say out loud that there's a tendency to not want to use it, even if it's correct. It's a common error, and all of the other "errors" you pointed out aren't errors in informal American/Canadian English.
Quote:
As for KRAD's novelization, I wasn't especially shot with it, myself, because I thought it was a poor editorial choice to construct the narrative in an autobiographical fashion, speaking in the characters' "voices" and changing from scene to scene as the focal character changes. I found it a conceit, very artificial and off-putting; I would have much preferred the narrative be simply that, because it doesn't really do a good job of getting into the characters' heads, the only really valid reason to take such an approach. I bought the book, but I gave up reading it after the first chapter, because of this; if he had chosen one character to relate the entire story, such as Inara or Kaylee, or possibly even River, I think it would have been a much stronger story.
If it didn't feel natural, than the narrative was stilted, which means it was awkwardly phrased. Phrasing obviously is the manner in which the words are put together, which can be directly related to sentence structure.
Good grammar in a sentence does not automatically equal sentence structure that isn't awkward, it just means that the sentence structure is all right by the standards of the official/academic version of the language.
And as a matter of fact, considering the very colloquial way in which Firefly's main characters tend to speak, I find it odd that you're basically saying: "It's
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME