slaves, tell me about 50 Shades of Grey

I don't get that article. In the first ten examples, there's only one that I can see that is problematic, and that's the use of tautology. The rest, well, they're just words. And relatively common words at that. Making the words simpler/more Germanic/less Romantic (in the linguistic sense, obv) don't change whether the writing is good at all.

*doesn't change, sorry.

yeah, there are a couple lelegit offenses in there, especially the words with nearly duplicate meanings, but most of the words highlighted in that article are acceptable choices. Looks like Patti shot at the broad side of a barn and missed.

16-17.

The offense: “He sits down beside me and buckles himself into his seat, then begins a protracted procedure of checking gauges and flipping switches and buttons from the mind-boggling array of dials and lights and switches in front of me.”

The fix: “He sits down beside me and buckles himself into his seat, then begins a dragged-out process of checking gauges and flipping switches and buttons from the mind-boggling array of dials and lights and switches in front of me.”

Yeah, no. If anything, you want "drawn-out process," but there's nothing wrong with "protracted."

"Dragged-out process?" Really?

“My heart is in my mouth as I reread his epistle and I huddle in the spare bed practically hugging my Mac.”

I would like to see a defense of this, too

Yeah, I'm scrolling down some more and I think I might hate whoever wrote this article more than James herself. FFS, do you REALLY think that people won't understand the word "immaterial"? Or "imploring"? What the hell is wrong with you? Yes, cut tautology and cliche, that's fine, but essentially what they're suggesting is that these words are alien and pretentious, when they're perfectly fucking serviceable words with real meanings.

The offense: “He hits me again, and the pain pulses and echoes along the line of the belt. Holy shit … that smarts.”

The fix: “He hits me again, and the pain pulses and echoes along the line of the belt. Holy shit … that hurts.”

emil.y -- you make an interesting point! that's why i think at least 30 of those are a matter of personal preference rather than straight thesaurus abuse.

there's an added wrinkle:
i have noticed that there's also a general tendency among (young?) writers to regard flowery language as pretentious and "simple" language preferred as a way to communicate down-to-earthness. using "look" as a transitional word to change the subject of the next paragraph, preferring phrasal verbs to precise verbs, using conversational language to communicate accessibility while discussing something that is possibly considered at least somewhat highfalutin, like politics or w/e.

that's another topic though.

IMO, what the author of this article is suggesting is that these words are being used to bring a veneer of sophistication to some stupid bullshit

The offense: Fifty Shades of Grey
The fix: Don't Read It

flowery -- in other words, vocabulary-strong (versus vocabulary-weak, using a phrase where a word will do, etc)
these are not formal terms, i'm just trying to speak descriptively

what i mean is that it's a sociolinguistic piece rather than a word police piece

“My heart is in my mouth as I reread his epistle and I huddle in the spare bed practically hugging my Mac.”

The problem with this is not 'epistle' in itself. It's that "my heart is in my mouth" is a down-home cliche, followed up with the archaic term (which while relatively accepting referring to a letter hasn't really transferred to use re: email, so the 'Mac' thing is problematic for that reason), there are too many active clauses that don't really work in a single sentence (heart in mouth, rereading, huddling, hugging), over-specificity re: Mac...

The offense: “He hits me again, and the pain pulses and echoes along the line of the belt. Holy shit … that smarts.”

The fix: “He hits me again, and the pain pulses and echoes along the line of the belt. Holy shit jeez … that hurts.”

exactly -- structurally (syntactically) and even pragmatically the sentence is +/- ok
it's the precise combination of everything that leaves us with a bad taste in our mouths, which is a matter of style and sociolinguistic implications as much as word abuse

which is interesting!

My heart is in my mouth. It's chewy and tastes of offal. I feel faint.

i once worked with a freelancer at a weekly paper, and one day her piece came in and contained the phrase, "... those Broadway shows you know and ardor."
it was doubly in need of changing because

(1) ardor is a noun, and you were clearly looking for a substitute verb for "love" only she looked under the nominal definition carelessly and
(2) you can't replace one word in a cliche and expect it to sound good. it will not sound good, it will sound double bad

so it was a complicated problem, more than just word police OR my personal style preference

you = she in (1) oops pardon my bad editing there

I blame the current state of creative writing curricula, and how teachers in general have learned to coach students on writing.

Show, don't tell. Use no adjectives. Use only plain language. Frustrated MFA grads have complained that they were still having this advise pounded into their heads late in their programs.

These are useful maxims for beginners. They reign in a lot of bad writing, but they are over-taught and they are not the end-all and be-all of rhetoric and style.

Exactly -- that's what I mean, it's a part of language that comes and goes with the tides and most people aren't aware that their tide isn't the only one

i always find the anti-adjective campaign weird (there's one now!). it's adverbs that need to be stamped out most of the time.

Also, as is made clear in the article above, some people have extreme ideas of what counts as flowery.

it's the precise combination of everything that leaves us with a bad taste in our mouths, which is a matter of style and sociolinguistic implications as much as word abuse

I just read a whole book on this topic:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517Mbej3AuL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

that's another lesson that people were taught, and comes and goes with the tides. there is nothing wrong with adverbs if you are not overusing them, or using them as sloppy shorthand for something else. re: "modifier phobia" http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3453

well yeah there's nothing wrong with anything. but i see adverbs attached like lampreys to drained and dead sentences way more often than i see adjectives.

(lampreys used here rather than leeches to tiptoe round the ghost of strunk and white)

still, is it the adverb's fault that the sentence is weak? fix the sentence, then see if the adverb is useful or not. kinda depends on what you're writing too.

still waiting to see someone stick up for I need to expend some of this excess, enervating energy.

sure. just, if you're trying to teach a green writer some helpful strategies for figuring out why their sentences don't work, "check for occurrences of the word 'massively'" is a pretty good one. the problem starts when people imagine it's productive to be a fundamentalist about this. just like all the other problems. xp

DJP - You haven't ever felt crazy manic and like you needed to run around? The sentiment is real even if the sentence is totally overwritten imo. (How was that?)

i'll stick up for that djp (and for "i need his proximity") if you stick up for the writer's down-to-earth, common-sensical suspicion of the grossly hoity-toity adjective "interminable"

anyway the worst one is "his jubilation has metamorphosed into concern"

I keep thinking of Stephanie Meyers and her obsession with 'chagrin', which always leads me back to The Princess Bride "You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."

I just like the idea of someone getting all incensed about the style of this book as a thinly veiled cultural criticism of the people who like it. That's way more interesting than the bad sentences themselves. I see bad sentences ALL THE TIME.

I think DJP is missing the point a little: some of the sentences pointed out in the article don't work. But the article as a whole fails because they're attacking, basically, any word that comes from a Romantic origin and replacing them with a Germanic equivalent = this is not how editing works, this is not how editing should work. 'Excess, enervating energy' is bad not because enervating is a complex word, it's bad for the reason that most of the writing in 50 Shades is bad, it has no consistency in tone. 'Enervating energy' may be a concept that jars you for a second, but it could actually work in a better piece of prose; 'excess, enervating energy', however, uses childlike alliteration to make you read the words quickly, so you're stuck with the sentence doing two things at once: it elides *and* it jars. It makes it confusing to read, so you assume that the writer is using the word incorrectly. She may well be doing so, but it doesn't mean that the word use is necessarily incorrect.

DJP - You haven't ever felt crazy manic and like you needed to run around? The sentiment is real even if the sentence is totally overwritten imo. (How was that?)

That was terrible! You concede the point that the sentence is overwritten! Furthermore, because "enervate" is most commonly used to indicate a lack of energy, using it in a context where the character is describing a need to get rid of a surfeit of energy is obfuscatory to authorial intent! And I say that as someone not at all averse to less common/fancier/longer/whatever-you-want-to-call-them words when the precision the sentiment being expressed demands them.

DLH: If "I need his proximity" is indicative of Alexandria's go-to phraseology, I begin to understand why Christian wanted so desperately to smack her with a belt.

I've never been very good at arguing. Or editorializing, for that matter.

emil.y that is a lovely piece of technical discourse analysis

uses childlike alliteration

It was the Anglo-Saxons who loved alliteration

Enervating energy is contradictory and makes the prose look pretentious. Pretentious in the sense of pretending to something, perhaps flowery, erudite prose, and failing to make any basic sense.

I think enervate means the opposite of what she thinks it means.

But if we were to substitute invigorating, it would still be redundant. "This excess energy makes me full of energy."

If she meant enervate, then maybe she is saying that excess energy actually has the effect of depleting energy. Which is a lot to pack into a few words, and maybe interesting, but still awkward in that sentence.

i think emil.y's right that "enervating energy" could be used successfully, as paradoxical reference to the way that being wound up can feel like a kind of exhaustion, although it's dangerous, and the alliteration (or whatever you call alliteration when it keeps going for multiple syllables) is always going to create a hurdle of goofiness. "exhausting" might be the better adjective, since it's still dissonant without being flat-out contradictory; i dunno. another weird thing here is that "enervating"'s been stuffed into the middle of the mild cliche "excess energy" like an attempt at disguise. and that nothing about the book's prose in general inspires confidence that the writer knows the phrase is a paradox.

mistaking enervate for it's opposite is a very common mistake.

its

(just being a pill, ignore me pls)

nah, I throw in unnecessary apostrophes all the time. I understand the difference, and I deserve to be called out on it

going on a Vivarin bender while cramming for finals in college = "enervating energy"

drinking 2 pots of coffee after 2 days of no sleep = enervating energy

prednisone = enervating energy

lol

butts