Improve Your Writing Part 1: Clarity

[Erios909]

Diego lunged forward, his left fist shooting out like a bullet. Wynn countered, sweeping the strike away with a windshield wiper motion. His other fist drove into Diego's upper stomach with a sickening thwack.

Diego's eyes widened as air burst from his gaping mouth and his knees buckled under the force of the blow.

Refusing to let him collapse, Wynn latched onto Diego's shirt with an iron grip, the fabric straining in his hand.

How about like this.

 

[Sebas_Guzman]

@Story_Marc , @melchi
You guys resolved this pretty well, but I want to jump in to talk about theory too!

So, to get some things out of the way, I’m pretty certain that Marc has higher reading comprehension than most people. I think this will bias him into longer sentences he might think are fine but are tough for people who only manga for example. People that read published epics and mainstream fantasy are probably going to be okay.

Melchi brings up a good point about audiobook narration. I think Marc’s style will lead to a higher rate of confusion. How much more, hard to say.

I’m biased to write action scenes the way Marc does, though, and there is a lot of merit in how he wrote that sequence.
Which leads me to one of Melchi’s point, that being about the paragraph for each.

I would argue that it should all be one paragraph. It’s a little crazy to me to break paragraphs up like this. I mean, I get the idea of a paragraph for a character, but I don’t think this one is the correct implementation. This is where discretion and judgment is involved.



Diego lunged, but Wynn deflected with his right arm, swinging it like a windshield wiper. Wynn then struck back, driving his left fist into Diego's stomach

This is the version I would go with. My interpretation is that this is all about Wynn. In this case, Diego is the guy setting Wynn’s sequence up. The value is in the counter. You can’t have the counter without Diego being the tool that instigates it.

The ‘but’ is the most critical thing. It’s what signals that this is very quickly not going Diego’s way, and it’s the most critical thing for establishing that this is Wynn’s paragraph.

“Diego lunged. Wynn deflected…” doesn’t give the same sense of the unexpected tide turner. It just makes it feel like a common exchange where Diego still has the pace and Wynn is just going along without taking Initiative.
For an audiobook, I believe my version here is the clear while still maintaining the dynamism. Obviously, the paragraph issue wouldn’t appear at all.


Marc mentioned it but it’s subjective. If I’m writing for an audiobook adaptation , I’d take care of using Marc’a style, but it’ll probably happen for action sequences. It’s really a situation of “the style works for those with the wisdom of when to use it.”

that just goes back to applying principles according to one’s own judgement.

 

[TheMonotonePuppet]

The grand piano in the concert hall, an instrument of immense and gleaming beauty, was eaten with remarkable gusto by zombies, who, not content with their musical feast, proceeded to devour the lavish velvet curtains, their groans harmonizing with the desperate wails of the ill-fated chandelier that was disassembled piece by piece, its crystal pendants scattered across the marble floor, reflecting a macabre dance of moonlight and shadow, all the while, the undead orchestra, in their insatiable hunger, gnawed on the gilt-edged seats, the once hallowed sanctuary of art and culture reduced to a cacophony of relentless chewing and the chilling echo of their undead existence.

Ignoring the run-on-ness done for comedy, it's really good! I like the scenery!

I've just always wondered why you do that when you always go on to add more. I'm admittedly a "cut to the chase" type of person. You do you though.

Can you write an exact example showing how you'd portray quick action, so I can see it in concrete terms instead of the abstract? Since I find it hard to understand how [X does action, but Y reacts and follows up] confuses you. Still, I wish to put forth the effort.

So, for example with a concrete example...



Does that confuse you? If it does, is it because more than one action is happening inside of a single sentence instead of placing a period instead of a comma and but? Or are you more confused by their being more than one motion after an initial action, like, they can only do a single thing and have to wait?

I'll need to understand where you get lost since it's hard for me to comprehend. And not just with an example I put down for the real version, but I mean as a general concept where you get lost if a sentence has more than one action in it if the actor has already been made clear.

While using the real sentence, not the W.I.P. version meant to be fixed as the episodes go on:

If you get lost in this one, such as with "drove" since it's further away from Wynn's name, how do you end up forgetting? I can see how it might, though I don't think that's all that common for people to get lost. I'd need to experiment since I know you can't please everybody (and so I don't care to), but I also don't like to write off people without truly exploring their worldview.

...And adding something in, as I decided to ask ChatGPT real quick on this, for an analysis. Here's what I got:

---

So yeah, if we go off of what it says, also factor in your target audience. My preference leans toward the more fluid and dynamic stuff that matches the quick pace of a physical confrontation. That said, I am used to actual combat scenarios, so I should factor in a wider audience appeal while staying true to what I know to be true. I decided to ask ChatGPT how it might simplify things while maintaining the cadence.



Is that easier for you? Or should I try to simplify even more?



If it's just a complex sentence structure that throws you off though, I'll sadly have to shrug there, due to my preference. After checking with this to make sure I wasn't off

But yeah, the important thing here to understand is you don't have to do any one particular approach. Other ways can work and it literally comes down to the target audience factor. This again comes around to why things are principles, not rules, and this is the true depth of how there isn't a "right" way so much as different ways to apply the same tool to achieve the desired effect. In a case like this, it depends on preference. As I hate that broken-down version due to the lack of fluidity, but I can understand how it might appeal to someone else. And I'm sure I could tinker with it, but I feel it would be a waste of time compared to much bigger, important things.

This is random and kind of unconnected, because I do think you are right in prioritizing cadence and such. But you inadvertently helped me, by leading me to the realization I need more terminology for fight scenes because I don't know many fighting moves.

Diego lunged.
Wynn deflected with his right arm, then struck back, driving his left fist into Diego's stomach.

I really dislike this action sentence. It's considerably worse relative to the original for me.

 

[Story_Marc]

How about like this.

That version would throw off the pace of the scene for me. I prefer sentence speed that mirrors the action itself.

As for @Sebas_Guzman example, that is a good foundation for the version I might use it for, though it comes down to intent on my part. The period version makes for a more measured punch. Like, it places emphasis on the deliberateness of Wynn's movements, which... I'm kind of thinking about now if I want to switch to emphasizing precision over speed in that. I might make a note for later as opposed to doing it now, but yeah, that's what that does. Conjunctions give the text a more continuous flow, which is good for speed and fluidity. The period would give just enough of a pause to get across a measured strike.

There is stuff to factor in for reading comprehension as well, which I'll discuss much more in the future. There are tests and such, but yeah, this is why knowing who one's target audience helps out big time. I'm a thriller/mystery writer first and foremost, even though I can alter my style

And yeah, reading comprehension skills are definitely important. And mine are probably quite high, though they aren't as high as some might expect IMO. I know enough to know there's still plenty I don't know.

But yeah, for an example of stuff I try to simplify with each episode, here's a peek at the text I used when making this episode...

The first level, lexical processing, begins when readers recognize individual words and assign them a fixed meaning, based on familiarity with the word from prior encounters. Using saccades, scientists have tracked the length of time our eyes linger on individual words and linked these saccades to EEG activity, measuring the amount of brain activity involved in identifying a word. But in English the speed of our eye movements depends entirely on the context surrounding a word. In English, neither the position of the word in the sentence nor the way the word ends clearly tells us whether hope is a noun (Please do not flush your unrealized hopes and dreams down the toilet, to quote the instructions on the toilet on a Virgin train in the UK) or a verb and a noun (I hope I didn’t flush my unrealized hopes and dreams down the toilet, as one passenger told me, on emerging from the same loo). And, if you’re reading the work of a writer untutored in the correct use of the hyphen – which includes a substantial chunk of the US population – “hope” might even be an adjective, as in “hope inducing,” rather than “hope-inducing,” where the hyphen helpfully tells the reader that at least the verb and noun forms of the word are out of the running. Even the word writing itself can act as a noun, verb, or even an adjective, as in I’m writing [verb] this writing [noun] on a writing [adjective] tablet, a sentence demanding readers disambiguate the three different parts of speech occupied by the same word, even with correct punctuation.

As a result, the interdependence of the meanings of words and their positions in a sentence inextricably links the first and second levels of processing.

And here's me simplifying it, while grabbing my script:

The first thing our brain does is play a game of "match the word." It looks at each word and tries to remember what it means based on all the times we've seen it before. But English, being the wonderfully tricky language it is, often has words that mean different things depending on where they are in the sentence. Like "hope," for example. It could be a thing you have, something you do, or even how you describe something.

Next, our brain starts playing detective, trying to figure out how the words all fit together in the sentence. It's like we're constantly guessing what's coming next based on what we've already read. Our brains love cause and effect.

Really want to do what I can to make this stuff more accessible for any who are interested.

Ignoring the run-on-ness done for comedy, it's really good! I like the scenery!

This is random and kind of unconnected, because I do think you are right in prioritizing cadence and such. But you inadvertently helped me, by leading me to the realization I need more terminology for fight scenes because I don't know many fighting moves.

I really dislike this action sentence. It's considerably worse relative to the original for me.

Glad it can help. And I hope the full episode on cadence itself can help you out. I've... so much to discuss on that. Even now, in this thread, I'm holding back a lot because it requires an insane amount of work from me. At the core of it, it comes back to rhetoric tools and the tactical usage of punctuation.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

I've just always wondered why you do that when you always go on to add more. I'm admittedly a "cut to the chase" type of person. You do you though.

Usually I don't add more and don't expect people to reply to me, that's why I write one word. This time was an exception. Sorry for going off-topic.