Words gone wild: Sentences that say nothing – or worse

It was the best of sentences, it was the worst of sentences - June Casagrande 2010

Words gone wild: Sentences that say nothing – or worse

Hanukkah, celebrated for eight nights, has traditionally meant one gift per night per child. You needn't do the math to figure out the number of gifts and cost when a Jewish grandparent has more than one grandchild.

I love this excerpt. It came across my desk one day while I was copyediting. It's hilarious to me. And sneaky. And insidious. This passage, which was never published and whose author will be glad to remain anonymous, is a classic example of what can happen when a writer stops paying attention to the meaning of her own words. Don't see the problem yet? That's okay. A little less coffee that day and I myself would have missed the delicious absurdity of the statement You needn't do the math to figure out the number.

Um, actually, that's what math is.

We can all take a lesson from this: Listen to your words. Choose them carefully. Try to fight the mental palsy that can cause even the best writer to spew nonsense. If you pay attention to your words, you can spot these problems and rewrite in a way that captures what you really mean, perhaps something like this:

You needn't do the math to see how quickly the costs can mount.

This remains true to what the writer wanted to say. Her point was that these costs compound so quickly that it's immediately evident. This rewrite captures that while eliminating a nonsensical assertion.

Here's another sentence in which the words got away from the writer:

The concert venue holds higher stakes for its performers by having the reach of a global audience through onsite TV and radio production broadcasting facilities.

This sentence is all-around clunky, but the problem that interests me is by having the reach of a global audience. That of could be construed to suggest possession. Think, to have the brains of Albert Einstein or the wit of Stephen Colbert. So, if you have the reach of a global audience, it means that you reach as far as a global audience reaches. But that wasn't the intended meaning. The writer meant that the venue can reach a global audience. The audience is not the reacher but the reachee. Somehow, the writer got too attached to the expression the reach of and didn't want to let it go, even after it was clear that it didn't work. All he had to do was think about what he really wanted to say:

The concert venue holds higher stakes for its performers by having the because it can reach of a global audience through on-site TV and radio production broadcasting facilities.

Here are two more sentences I came across in my copyediting work:

It's as enticing as the caramel topping on a candied apple.

and

Autumn is a great time to enjoy the region's ambient weather.

Caramel topping on a candied apple makes me smile. Ambient weather makes me laugh. Ambient means "of the surrounding area or environment." Yet the writer seemed to think it was necessary to distinguish that from all the nonambient weather in the region. No doubt, she just liked the sound of her words and didn't think about meaning. I deleted ambient.

As for our fusion dessert, if there's some region of the country where people serve those hard-shell, bright red candy apples with a dollop of caramel on top, it still doesn't excuse this sentence. If you find the caramel on an apple enticing, then you probably find a caramel apple enticing. Specifying the part you find most appealing— the topping—isn't worth the extra words. Not in this case, anyway. On the other hand, if the writer loves caramel but doesn't like apples, a caramel apple is not a great example of something that's enticing. Chocolate-covered ants come to mind.

I changed the sentence to

It's as enticing as a caramel apple.

This problem—the writer paying too little attention to her words—seems most common in news and feature writing. But many novice fiction writers seem to have the opposite problem: They pay too much attention to their words. They try to concoct powerful metaphors. Or they try to find an original turn of phrase. Ironically, they end up having the same problem as the unthinking nonfiction writers: meaning wriggles out of their grasp.

The sun had stewed all night for that morning. At first light it glared furiously on Lucy's hometown. Lucy was an illness-fated girl. She had passed away during the night. Her body distilled into morning where it slowly began to suppurate. Her basement room drew dark stains as electricity became one with the aged drywall. An indifferent monotone shirred. There was an aroma of singed hair when it happened.

The original version of this disguised excerpt wasn't quite this bad, but it was close, and it contained all the same problems.

When I read stuff like this, I can't help but think of Narcissus. He was the guy from Greek mythology who became so transfixed by his own reflection in a pool of water that he fell in and drowned. If you want to gaze lovingly at your own ability to imagine the sun stewing or a dead body distilling, disconnect your Internet, stick a wad of gum in your flash drive, close the door, and have a ball. Just don't expect your Reader to jump in the reflecting pool with you to willingly drown in the beauty of your words. Metaphors can indeed be beautiful and powerful, but for many writers (present company included) they're very hard to pull off.

I can't tell you how to write good metaphors. But I can offer you a sort of guiding light to help you distinguish good metaphors from bad. You already know it: it's the concept of Reader-serving writing versus writer-serving writing.

A Reader of fiction—be it popular or literary fiction—wants to be told a story. If you can craft metaphors that enhance that story, do. If you can craft metaphors that are so beautiful that they can stand on their own—that they can provide the Reader with as much pleasure as the story—that's an art in itself. But as a rule, if a turn of phrase, a parallel, a comparison, or a metaphor doesn't enhance your Reader's experience, cash it in for straightforward language. That way, though you may not be turning words into divine music of the heart, at least you're not messing up your story.

Here's a bare-bones approach to the same passage that opts for substance over style:

Lucy had always been a sickly girl. On the night she died, dark stains appeared on the aged drywall of her basement room. The next morning, as the sun beat down mercilessly, there was a mysterious sound—an indifferent monotone. The smell of burned hair hung in the air.

Chances are this would not be well received by the writer. The unpublished author who inspired our passage was in love with his descriptions. Indeed, he openly admitted that he loved the idea of one of his metaphors and didn't want to let it go—even after several other writers told him to bag it.

A lot of Readers might not prefer our revised paragraph, either. (Heck, even I am not totally sold on it.) The rewrite discards a lot of information—facts and imagery some might consider pivotal. But most people would agree that this version better facilitates story. It tells you what happened—not what the sun had been doing during and prior to something happening. And it does so with words whose meanings are clear.

For example, we changed an indifferent monotone shirred. Monotone in its original context was painfully unclear. The writer was trying to say that there was a noise coming from somewhere, but a noise and a sound are far more concrete than a monotone. The original raises the question: a monotone what? We answered that question by making monotone an appositive—a repeat, so to speak—of a new word we brought in: sound. When you have a strange sound coming from somewhere unknown, that fact is important and interesting and needs to be treated as such. By stating it outright in clear terms, we do justice to this intriguing story element.

Also, we ditched shirred. The writer had misused the word, which really means "to gather up cloth and sew it together in bunches or rows." Even so, this shirred almost worked for me—almost. It conjured up something like a whirring, just silkier. But in a passage composed almost exclusively of vague words—words that dance around meaning—some of them had to go. The subject of the original sentence was a monotone. The action was shirred. A sentence whose core says nothing more than a monotone shirred is pure mush that, when surrounded by more mush, just won't do.

We replaced illness-fated with sickly. Is this because sickly is a good word? On the contrary, it's cliched. But it's still a heck of a lot better than illness-fated. Made-up compound modifiers are always risky. You can say a man is doomed to failure, but are you really nailing it when you call him a failure-doomed man ? Our writer was reaching for a good idea—that Lucy was fated to suffer illnesses. But the writer couldn't find a way to say so in meaningful language. He needed to "kill his darlings"—Stephen King's favorite term for letting go of stuff that just doesn't work.

We ditched the wording about how the walls drew dark stains. Did drew, a past form of draw, mean that the drywall attracted dark stains, the way manure draws flies? Did it mean that the walls sketched the stains, as if with a pen? Neither of these common definitions of drew makes sense here. The writer might answer that this ambiguity is exactly what he was shooting for. But that doesn't matter because it doesn't work. So we cashed in drew dark stains for plain vanilla language that lets the interesting story detail shine through: dark stains appeared.

Of course, these edits are purely subjective. Creative writing need not be bound by things like logic or clarity or common sense. But Reader-serving writing requires that we at least consider such alternatives.

When writing, you may want to call a man "a towering steel-belted radial," you may want to call a woman "a field of lichen," or you may want to call a gun "a glinting and gaping death tube," but before you do, stop and think about whether it's really best for the story and for the Reader.

For quintessential examples of words completely devoid of meaning, you must stray outside both fiction and feature writing to the realm of marketing writing. And if you're looking for the gold standard of empty words, read about spas:

Customized scrubs and sea salt baths begin with the choice of one of four aroma essences. Each essence, a blend of 100% pure essential oils with certified organic ingredients, is inspired by the elements.

That's right—an essence that's made of essential oils and ingredients! Genius. Of course, it's genius only if you're trying to avoid saying anything of substance. But this is a rare situation—rare even for marketing writers because most good marketing writing conveys actual information. Spas are an exception because the only alternative to writing empty words is to say, "We smear mud and food on you for an hour."

The point is: Pay attention to your words. Try not to zone out or become hypnotized by the cliches that live in all our heads and that try to slip into everyone's writing. When you reread your writing, try to do so with a scrutinizing eye that asks, Did I really mean that you don't have to do the math to figure out the number? Is there really any meaning in a monotone shirred?. Or is there a better way to nail down what I really mean?