Observations on Lead-Led?

Last time I checked lead, pronounced with a short e, was a metallic substance and not the past tense of lead––long e. So why do I read lead so often where I should be reading led, not just in submissions but in respected newspapers?

"The suspect lead police on a high-speed chase."

Perhaps it is because it just doesn't look right? As a little three-letter word, led does seem more the proper spelling for the metal, while lead/lead appears to follow the rules of read/read. Though if red were the proper past tense of read, I'd be less likely to misread it as I often do. And now with LED, in caps, becoming common in referring to environmentally friendly lighting, we have another confusion thrown into the mix.

Going by how often I see lead where I should see led, I'm guessing the little word may be on the verge of becoming obsolete just as the term comprised of  has come to replace the more proper comprised. As in, "the town comprised a courthouse and three shops"––only purists insist on that now––or the way the em-dash (as used in this sentence) has become more popular than parentheses or the word media is used by the media as both singular and plural.

In the end I predict led will lose because, after all, lead carries more weight.

Don't Take Rules Too Seriously

Once again Hope Clark's Funds for Writers newsletter has inspired my post. In "The Don't-Do-That Rut" article from her Small Markets letter, she opines about those writers who "rattle off absolutes" in forums and chatrooms. I've visited those forums where (these are my thoughts, not Hope's) writers who reached their peak some thirty years ago spout outdated dogma like "never write for free" or "Internet credits don't count as much as print" to unsuspecting newbies. While I was on the losing end of that type of advice when I first started, Hope's article also got me thinking about the "rules" we read in just about every issue of popular writing magazines and how writers can fail as much by following those rules too closely as by ignoring them.

Show, don't tell
I recently read an article––unfortunately I can't remember where––noting that "show, don't tell" is not so much a rule as a fashion that is now becoming passe. That could be due to the realization that some writers are taking this to the point of extreme tedium. True, if a character plays an important role in a story, for example, an overbearing mother, you will want to show us instances where the mother is being overbearing. But if the mother is dead or Mary wonders, just in passing, if her mother's overbearing personality might have influenced the way she raises her own children, you can simply say that. You don't need Mary to flashback 20 years remembering her mother's words on the night of the senior prom. That's just added junk your story doesn't need.

Avoid cliche like the plague
Okay, I threw that cliche in there just for a little humor, but some writers think avoiding cliche means never saying anything the same way others have said it. A character's eyes can't "well with tears." Instead, "pools of water form and hang suspended above his lower eyelids." What do all those extra words accomplish beyond telling us the the writer has oh so cleverly found a different way to describe a common phenomenon. We've all seen someone's eyes fill or well with tears. You really can't add any clarity to such a standard image, so just say what you need to say and move on.

Always use active rather than passive voice
This is one Hope mentions as well, and it is another rule that, taken too seriously, can ruin your writing. Again, this is partially a matter of fashion. Writers of bygone times often made more use of passive voice than we do today as do many writers outside the US. More important than sticking to the active voice is making sure the voice you choose fits the story and the time in which it is set, and varying your sentence structure. Just like anything else, now and again we need to slow the pace for our readers, and passive sentences are the best way to do that.

No run-on sentences
One of my favorite authors, Edith Wharton, wrote sentences that took up entire paragraphs. She wrote mostly about the Gilded Age in America, and I can't imagine writing about those times with anything other than her perfectly crafted sentences that swirled this way and that, circling back to where they started. Even Ernest Hemingway, king of the minimalists, whom we usually associate with the short, declarative sentence, in reality often used very long sentences peppered with conjunctions, especially in his descriptions. Here's an example from For Whom the Bell Tolls,

This officer shot two men as they lay and still they would not get up and he was cursing them and finally they got up, one two and three at a time and came running toward us and the train.

Speaking of rules, notice the unorthodox use (or lack thereof) of commas in that excerpt.

It's good to read a few magazines or books about writing to get a general flavor of the current writing "fashion." However, writers will learn even more by reading the actual work of contemporary writers as well as older writers whose styles could add a little variation to our own writing. By doing so, writers develop an ear for what works and don't need to rely so heavily on the "rules."

Grammar Matters, Or Does It?

On her blog Tender Graces, my writer/editor/blogger friend Kat Magendie has been posting a useful series on grammar. Writers vary greatly on how much weight they give to grammar in their writing, from the college kid who thinks what he says is oh so much more important than where he places the commas and periods (if he places them at all) to the gal who writes dialogue like "Yes, Officer, he is the person to whom I spoke."

First off, it is far more important to know and use proper grammar than most young writers think. Submitting a piece filled with grammar mistakes is like going to a job interview in flip-flops and cut-offs. At the same time, putting stodgy dialogue in the mouths of your characters simply because it is grammatically correct will also mark you as an amateur. That applies to your characters' internal dialogue as well. Most of us don't try to remember "to whom" we were speaking the other night.

Punctuation is another tough one. Going strictly by the rules we would all use semicolons much more than we do. When was the last time you used a semicolon before "however" or "therefore?" About the only time I use a semicolon these days is Rule 4, to separate a series when one or more of the units contains a comma. Speaking of the comma, I have been accused of both over-using and under-using this little bit of punctuation at different times in my life and once regarding the same piece read by two different people.

Whether a comma should go before the last unit in a series (Meg, Susan, and I) can be arguing too fine a point. Certain stylebooks say it should, but at least one that I know of, The AP Stylebook, says it shouldn't. Only a very picky editor will deny a piece based on her disagreement with that last comma, but she may deny a piece with no comma between Meg and Susan, especially if that type of error appears more than once.

Flexibility in grammar rules will also vary depending on the genre. While I noted that "whom" often feels stilted in a short story, the sentence "He couldn't remember who he talked to about it" sounds inappropriate for a news article, unless the journalist is quoting someone.

Then there are the words misused so often the misuse becomes acceptable. I can't tell you how many times I've read that "the car collided with a pole." For objects to collide, technically both have to be in motion. And the term "comprised of" used to be considered poor English, not to mention redundent. One should say "The housing development comprises two streets with townhomes and one with single homes." Yet the former has become so common as to be acceptable.

So what is a writer to make of all this?

Before you begin submitting you should be aware of the major rules, the ones no one should break. These are rules like putting a period at the end of a declarative sentence and a question mark after a question; putting punctuation inside of quotation marks; putting the period/question mark outside parentheses unless the parenthetical phrase is a separate and complete sentence. (You will notice my use of the semicolon because "and" appeared in the first unit of the series.) You must understand subject and verb agreement, i.e., plural subject with plural verb and vice versa. An editor might let you off the hook for "The group are going" instead of "The group is going," but you won't ever get away with "They was going" unless it is the dialogue of an uneducated character. You also have to know how to format dialogue correctly.Break any of these rules and your writing will appear too sloppy to take seriously.

Beyond those rules, don't sweat the small stuff. The big stuff is knowing to place a comma before or after the tag line or start a new paragraph for each speaker.

Mary said, "I'm going with you."

"Oh no you won't," said John. "You won't be ready in time."

The small stuff, at least in this editor's mind, is something like how you would punctuate the same dialogue if you reversed the word order of the tag to "John said" in place of "said John." Is it

"Oh no you won't." John said.

or

"Oh no you won't," John said.

I've seen it both ways, and to tell you the truth, I couldn't give a rat's tail which way the author decides to punctuate it. I leave that to the grammar mavens. Some people will debate the fine points of grammar like lawyers debate Supreme Court decisions. For the rest of us, it is more important to keep writing.

Punctuation: Here's a Good Article on Commas

Now and again I like to share interesting posts of grammar and punctuation. Here's an interesting one, and I must admit I thought the name should always be offset with commas.

Make sure to scroll all the way down through the comments to the Canadian contract. Maybe it is my background as a paralegal that makes me use so many commas.