Tale of a Sentence Vampire Hunter

May 19, 2014July 8, 2014Sue Archer 16 Comments

All my life, I’ve been warned about the danger of sentence vampires. They suck the lifeblood out of words until you are too lethargic to read anything. Their paths are littered with the corpses of dynamic verbs and the ghosts of active clauses. Sentence vampires fly under the radar, hoping that people won’t notice their existence until it’s too late. But I know better. Family writing lore has told me that I am destined to fight them. I am a sentence vampire hunter. And you can become one, too!

They may be sparkly, but they’re still vampires. Beware!

Where to Find Sentence Vampires, Part 1: Linking Verbs

To hunt sentence vampires, you need to know where to find them.

Linking verbs are a good place to start, because they are a primary source of low-energy sentences. These verbs describe the subject of a sentence. They talk about what someone is thinking, feeling, sensing, or becoming. The most common linking verb is to be, but there are many others.

Linking verbs are very different from high-energy dynamic verbs, which describe actions. (I staked the vampire.) Using too many linking verbs on a page creates the perfect environment for sentence vampires. These literary predators are constantly in search of passive victims who don’t have the energy to run away. Let me tell you a tale of linking verbs, to show you what I mean.

***

In a sleepy small town, a sentence vampire weaves his way through the party guests at a local bar. He is searching for young people who use linking verbs. Linking verb users are his preferred victims. They are too lazy to do anything but talk, and are easy to capture. He zeroes in on a group of self-absorbed young girls who are gossiping using linking verbs.

“She seemed out of it today.”

“And didn’t she smell weird?”

“That’s because she is weird.”

“I think she’s crazy.”

The other guests near the girls are bored listening to their low-energy linking verbs. Their attention is on the football game, where action is happening. This is a perfect opportunity for the vampire to strike.

One of the girls catches sight of the vampire. She thinks he looks handsome. As he mesmerizes her with his glowing eyes, she murmurs, “I feel funny.” She passively follows the vampire. Her friends are too busy talking. They don’t notice anything. They are surrounded by linking verbs and are unable to act. Eventually they look around, but she is already gone.

***

Where to Find Vampires, Part 2: Passive Voice

Sentence vampires also like to hang around the passive voice. In a passive voice sentence, the person performing an action goes at the end of the sentence, or is left out altogether. This is in contrast to the active voice, where the acting person comes first in the sentence. The passive voice creates long sentences that wear out a reader. It can be hard for the reader to identify who performed the action.

Vampires love low-energy passive voice sentences. These sentences make it easier for them to avoid responsibility for their actions. Wondering what happened to the vampire victim in my earlier tale? Let’s find out, and see how the passive voice makes the vampires happy.

***

The next day, the town is abuzz. A girl was found abandoned by the roadside, suffering from a rare combination of anemia and amnesia. The sheriff holds a press conference in front of the town hall. Despite the clear evidence of sentence vampires, she doesn’t want the town to panic. So she tries to downplay the situation by using the passive voice. Her use of the passive voice allows the sheriff to avoid talking about vampires and the police’s responsibility to find them.

“I can confirm that the victim was found by the roadside. It appears that the victim was abducted. All leads are being pursued. The public will be informed once further information is known.”

The sheriff escapes into her office. She is thankful that she didn’t have to say straight out in the active voice, “A vampire abducted one of our girls, and we have no idea what to do!” She’d never get re-elected.

Plus, she’d have to tell The Mayor…and you don’t want to see what he looks like when he gets angry. (Or hey, if you do, watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 3.)

The vampire watches the news conference from his lair and laughs silently. Once again passivity has taken over the town, and he has avoided being noticed. He is going to get away with it.

***

How to Destroy a Sentence Vampire

The best way to defeat a sentence vampire is to use the two things that they hate the most: action verbs and the active voice. Start most of your sentences with the person performing the action, and try to make that action a dynamic one. Then you, too, can be a successful sentence vampire hunter!

***

I watch the sheriff deny the existence of vampires using wimpy passive sentences, and I think not this time. I grab my writing tools and head for the outskirts.

I kick down the door and confront the vampire in his lair. The vampire laughs at me and attempts to capture my gaze. I shake off the effects of his eyes and shoot a crossbow bolt through the west-facing window. Sunlight streams in and surrounds the vampire in a fiery haze. The vampire screams and disintegrates into a pile of inky black dust.

I’ve finally brought the sentence vampire to light. My work in this town is done. It’s time to walk off into the sunset and move on to the next page. Such is the wandering life of a sentence vampire hunter…

You Can’t Get There from Here

May 12, 2014July 8, 2014Sue Archer 10 Comments

Navigating through a document can be treacherous. You don’t know what hazards may be out there. As you travel through the spaces between words, you are taking your life in your hands. Will your energy be drained away by disorganized or dense writing? Take heart—help is on the way.

How to find your way through the words (a survival guide)

When travelling through documents, there are three critical hazards that you may encounter:

Arriving at the wrong destination
Getting lost on the way
Freezing in the face of obstacles

In the event that one of these things happens to you, follow the procedures below. I guarantee you will survive!

Arriving at the wrong destination

You need to find a piece of information. You’ve identified a likely heading, and you run through the start-up sequence. With your destination locked, you step through the portal. But instead of arriving at the treasured Temple of Knowledge, you find yourself entering the Land of the Confused. Your Stargate scientists have messed up again. And now you can’t get back!

Stargate Dialing Sequence. Source: SGC.Alex on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

The important thing is not to panic. Look around you and see if you have the materials to build any of the following:

An accurate table of contents with meaningful, consistent titles
An overview that summarizes the topics in the order that they appear
References to the locations of related items (your standard toolkit should have what you need to make hyperlinks)

If you can create any of these, then all may not be lost. Keep track of your rations and get moving, soldier!

Getting lost on the way

You know that your destination is the right one. All you need to do is fly through hyperspace from your current jumpgate to the next. Your path has been clearly laid out. But while you are moving through hyperspace, you collide with an unrelated sentence that damages your attention span. Or you are sucked into a gravity well of rambling thoughts that are putting you to sleep. Babylon 5 Control should never have sent you that close to Jupiter!

Don’t worry – you’re going to be okay!

Remember your training and take action:

Aim for paragraphs that cover a single idea
Look out for an opening sentence that introduces the topic of that paragraph and focus on it
Destroy all sentences that do not directly relate to that topic

Get back on the right path and fly on, pilot!

Freezing in the face of obstacles

It happens to everyone. You are speeding your way through the galaxy, and then suddenly you run into a wall of large and confusing word asteroids. You don’t want to damage your ship. But sometimes you need to take a risk and move on through. Otherwise you might as well give up the fight and let the Empire win!

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Asteroid Field

From Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Use your ship’s capabilities to get through the obstacles:

Launch your missiles and split large asteroid words into smaller ones
Use your tractor beam to pull apart dense text clusters and create white space on the page
Ask your ship’s computer (or that annoying protocol droid) to come up with alternative words that are not a threat

Now fire up that hyperdrive and go win the day!

Congratulations! You have found your way through the words of a hazardous document. Hopefully you have suffered minimal damage. Remember these tips for next time, and plan ahead before you start your journey!

Have you ever read something that you just couldn’t get through, or struggled with how to organize your own writing? Share your stories below…

Slay those villainous pronouns!

March 30, 2014April 27, 2014Sue Archer 10 Comments

Epic fantasy books often have a huge cast of characters. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin has over two hundred of them. I love this novel, but keeping track of everyone can be hard on the brain!

No, him! That guy! The one with the…oh, never mind.

Luckily, Martin does a fantastic job writing about his characters. (This is why his book has turned into a popular HBO series.)

Even with a smaller number of characters, it can be tough to figure out who’s doing what. This is because writers tend to rely too much on pronouns.

Those Sneaky Pronouns

When you write a lot about the same people, you can get tired of repeating names all the time. This is why you use personal pronouns—like he, she, or they—to take the place of the names. It’s okay to do this, as long as your readers know who the pronoun is replacing (the antecedent of the pronoun). Unfortunately, your readers may not be able to tell. They’ve fallen into the ambiguous antecedent trap!

Two Sentences, Three Ways

I’m going to take a passage from A Game of Thrones to show you what I mean by troublesome pronouns. Here’s the original text:

“Will could see the tightness around Gared’s mouth, the barely suppressed anger in his eyes under the thick black hood of his cloak. Gared had spent forty years in the Night Watch, man and boy, and he was not accustomed to being made light of.”

After reading this passage, we know something about Gared and his history. The meaning is clear. But what if I replace one name with a pronoun?

“Will could see the tightness around Gared’s mouth, the barely suppressed anger in his eyes under the thick black hood of his cloak. He had spent forty years in the Night Watch, man and boy, and he was not accustomed to being made light of.”

Now we have to think. Is “he” referring to Will, or to Gared? We might guess it’s Will because Will is the subject of the first sentence. Eventually, we figure out that it’s grumpy Gared. Meanwhile, we’re grumpy that we had to think about this.

What happens if I replace another name? Uh oh.

“Will could see the tightness around his mouth, the barely suppressed anger in his eyes under the thick black hood of his cloak. He had spent forty years in the Night Watch, man and boy, and he was not accustomed to being made light of.”

Now we have no idea what’s happening. Is Will looking at his reflection? There’s nothing that tells us otherwise. We’ve lost track of Gared altogether.

See what I mean about the dangers of pronouns?

A Call to Arms

The best way to avoid this trap is to pay attention to those sneaky pronouns. Are you sure that your reader is going to know your meaning when you use one? If not, you can try one of these tactics:

Get rid of that pronoun and replace it with the noun. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it can make your sentences feel repetitive. You be the judge.
Change the order of your words so that the pronoun is closer to the original noun (the antecedent). This makes it easier to tell that the two words are related to each other.
Reword your sentence so that you don’t have to use a pronoun. Who needs them, anyway?

Don’t let your readers be ambushed by pronouns. It’s time to fight back!

(P.S. Here’s a bonus link about ebook typos for Game of Thrones fans. Enjoy!)

Go short

March 17, 2014March 18, 2014Sue Archer 2 Comments

What’s your favourite line from a movie you love?

One of my favourite lines is from The Matrix, a movie that has generated many famous catchphrases. There are posters all over the net asking us to choose between the red pill or the blue pill. Fans debate the meaning of “There is no spoon.” For me, however, the best line comes when Trinity does a cool move and takes out an Agent: Dodge this.

This is a brilliant visual scene, with great angles and use of “bullet time” camera techniques. But the line itself is equally important. Why is this such a memorable line? I could answer this by talking about character, or plot, or scene context. But here’s an even better reason: it’s short.

Think about your favourite movie line. Is it short, too? Chances are it is. Otherwise you probably wouldn’t remember it.

When we communicate with others, we can choose from different styles. We can weave and dodge and come up with fancy words and meandering sentences. Or we can go for it and cut straight to the chase. Which style do you prefer to listen to? (Yes, this is a trick question.)

Here’s my first tip on communication: Go short. Use short sentences with short words. This is the best way to truly connect with your audience.

You might think that going long will make you sound impressive. Unfortunately, you will likely end up distancing yourself from others. The human brain is constantly bombarded by information, and we don’t have the energy to sift through it all. It’s difficult for us to remember anything, let alone long and wordy sentences. And what’s the point of communicating if what you say won’t be remembered?

Many people find it’s hard to go short. If you cut your teeth writing essays in university (like I did), you may find it especially difficult. After years of trying to get great marks by using long phrases, suddenly you need to shift to a new way of thinking. So how can you do it? Here’s a few tips to get you started:

Make sure each sentence contains only one idea. Every time you start to add on another idea, begin a new sentence.
Aim for sentences of twenty words or less. This doesn’t mean all of your sentences need to be this short—it’s good to break things up with a long sentence once in a while. Just keep in mind that twenty words is the general limit for most audiences. (Academics tend to be an exception, since they are dealing with complex ideas.)
Watch out for connecting words, otherwise known as conjunctions. These words connect ideas together, and are fabulous tools. But connected ideas don’t always have to be in the same sentence. Despite what your English teacher may have told you, it is okay to start a sentence with a conjunction, like “and.” Or “but.” Or “or.” So feel free to break those ideas apart into separate sentences.

If you go short, you’re well on your way to communicating something memorable. Maybe you will even come up with the next catchphrase. And if you’re still not convinced that short is the new black, just think about the scene from The Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo is about to be frozen in carbonite: