Category: spelling

            Pop culture reference!  Hasn’t been one in ages.  This one’ll make sense in a few minutes.

            I wanted to take a moment to rant about one of my favorite topics—spelling.  Any of you longtime readers know how I feel about misspelled and misused words.  But this week I’d like to approach a specific facet of that problem.

            One thing I see a lot is folks who misuse compound words.  If, for some awful reason you don’t know, a compound word is when you mash two words together and create a new word. And much like the lions that merge into Voltron or the Combaticons combining into Bruticus, sometimes that word is greater than the sum of its parts.

            In fact… sometimes the word is very different from the sum of its parts.  For example, a kneecap is a floating bone in your leg that protects the hinge joint.  But a knee cap is a little hat you wear above your calf.  By extention, kneecapping is the brutal practice of breaking that bone, usually with a bullet, while knee capping is the weird and somewhat creepy habit of putting tiny headgear on other people’s joints.

            Or your own joints, I guess.

            But that almost makes it weirder.

            Want another one?  Whiplash is a condition caused by a sudden thrashing of the neck.  A whip lash can refer to either the leather straps of the whip or the whip’s actual strike.  Like in Pirates of the Carribean,when Davy Jones threatens Will Turner with five whip lashes.

            See the problem here?  The compound word and the phrase refer to two different things. And if my reader has even a faint grasp of vocabulary, they’re going to stumble over my un-compounded word and go back to read it again.  I might know what pissantmeans, but if I come across piss ant… well, is that one of the creepy crawlies from Chuck Wendig’s new book?

            Take a look at a few more of these and see if you stumble on any of them…

straitjacket vs. straight jacket

something vs. some thing

hardcore vs. hard core

breakneck vs. break neck

kingpin vs king pin

connectability vs connect ability

maybe vs. may be

lovesick vs. love sick

sometime vs. some time

            Did you feel it?  That little pause when you were reading?          How many of these did that to you? A few?  Some? If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’ve got a thing for writing, so maybe a lot of them.

            Y’see, Timmy, once I break the compound word apart, it’s… well, two words. And as long as those two words are spelled correctly… well, that’s all that matters, right?  Most people will get the general meaning from context.

           I think folks do this because they don’t know how to spell the compound word correctly and break it apart to “fix” it.  Maybe my spellchecker kept rejecting straightjacket but once I broke it into two words… oh, well that must be right now.  It’s one of those cases where I’ve assumed the machine is much smarter than I am.

            But that flow-break becomes even worse when people aren’t even using the right words.  I’ve seen people talk about mere cats in Africa and the turn styles in the New York subways.  My spellchecker will accept those, too, just like it will any other misused word.

            Hyphens don’t help the situation.  Most spellcheckers will accept a hyphenated word as correct if the two individual words are correct.  For example, mistake, missed-take, miss-steak, and mist-ache are all spelled correctly.

            The real problem here is that—like any spelling mistake—these sort of mess-ups will break the flow of my story.  If my reader spends just two seconds trying to figure out what liberated bricklayers have to do with an urban fantasy story, they’ve stopped reading in order to analyze.  And once they start analyzing… it’s hard to get them to stop.

            And yeah, a lot of folks will almost immediately figure out that when I said free masons I actually meant the Freemasons—that semi-secretive service organization that so many hack writers use as a fallback source for historical mystery (check out my new book, Paradox Bound, coming out next September). 

            But…

            That pause is still going to happen.  After three or four instances of breaking the flow like that, the reader’s going to set my book aside for something easier to understand.  Like an Overwatch hint guide. Or a rewatch of Stranger Things.

            I need to know how words work. Including compound words. Knowing the two halves doesn’t mean I know the whole, and vice-versa.  I have to know how words work. And what they mean.  And how to spell them.

            In closing, being able to proofread something is a skill every writer needs to develop.  But anyone can proof read… provided the proof is in a language they understand.

            Next time, I want to talk about that guy.  No, no,not him. The other guy.

            And I’ll probably have an update on the whole Amazon review thing, too.

            Until then, go write.

            By the time you’re reading this, I’m either high in the air soaring over the American southwest, or possibly landed and already in the hotel bar.  Yes, even if you’re reading this sometime on the weekend, there’s a decent chance I’m in the hotel bar.  I’m at Texas Frightmare Weekend, stop by and say hullo.

            Anyway…

            Looking back through things, I decided we were overdue to discuss that most favorite of topics… spelling.

            I know I hammer on spelling a lot.  At least two posts a year, which means something like one out of twenty posts on average.  I brought it up at the Writers Coffeehouse recently and got a couple pleasant smiles and a few eye-rolls from folks.  Even as a non-telepath, I could almost feel and hear the thought-waves bouncing around the room.  “Of course we need to know about spelling. That’s a given. Can we get to the important stuff?”

            Here’s the thing though…

            I’ve talked with lots of editors.  And a couple of agents.  Plus, back in the day, I interviewed a dozen or more folks who ran screenwriting contests across the country (even some of the really big ones you’ve heard about).  D’you know what every single one of them named as the number one mistake they saw?  The most glaring, common problem with submissions?

            Spelling.

            Grammar came in a close second, but everyone said spelling first.  Not formatting. Not subject matter. Spelling was the problem they saw again and again and again.

            Which is why I tend to go on about it here.  It’s a very basic, very common problem, one that can lead an editor to throw my manuscript on that big pile on the left.  And I think the advent of technology has made it a hard problem to acknowledge. For example, if you’ve been following the ranty blog for a while, you might remember me using this sentence a few times before…

            Now, the first impulse is to say pretty much every word in that sentence is spelled wrong.  The catch is… none of them are.  Oh, most of them aren’t the right word, yes, but they’re all spelled correctly.

           This is what I’m talking about with “the advent of technology.” See, when I ran this document through a spellchecker, it leaped right over that sentence.  Because there aren’t any spelling mistakes in it.  And so this leads a lot of people to believe they’re much better spellers than they really are.

            Also, to be clear, I’m not talking about typos.  Y’know, when you’re going to fast and leave an O off too, or you’re just caught in the moment and miss that R altogethe.  Or we’re in a groove, type hearinstead of here, and forget to go back in the flurry of words.  That happens to everybody.  All of us make typos.  Every pro writer, every novice, every rank amateur.  I don’t think I’ve ever shown a manuscript to a beta reader or editors and not have them find at least half a dozen typos in there.

            What I’m talking about is not knowing how to spell in the first place.  If I don’t know the difference between itsand it’s, I’m going to have a tough time as a writer. Same thing with the infamous they’re, their, and there.  If I’m pretty sure I know what anathemameans (deadly poison, right?), but I never bother to actually learn what it means, odd are I’ll be using it wrong a lot. 

            And when I make all these mistakes, my spellchecker’s still going to tell me my manuscript is absolutely fine.  And so some folks who are really awful at spelling never improve.  They see no need to.  The computer told them they were right.  You’re not going to argue with the Machine, are you!?!?  It told me the words were all correct!!

            That’s when this gets really silly.  Sometimes the spelling will be so redacalusey off on a word that spellchecker kind of flails for a second and throws out its best guess.  And if I don’t know how to spell or what words really mean, I might just blindly accept whatever the Machine tells me.  Like up above.  You understood from context that I meant to write ridiculously, but the spellchecker just looked for a close match and gave me radicalize.

            Let me give you another example.  I read a manuscript recently with a heavy crime element and it kept referring to “the infighting incident.”  I could not for the life of me figure out what it was talking about.  Was there some internal mob power struggle going on that I’d missed?

            After a few attempts, it hit me. The author hadn’t written in infighting—they’d written insighting, a bad attempt to spell inciting.  So when the Machine hit insighting, it suggested the closest word and they said “sure, change it.”

            Check out this list of words. They’re all pulled from various books, articles, and blog posts.  One or two of them were mine.  All of them are from people trying to come across as professionals.

a lot vs.allot

pleas vs.please

possible vs. posable

mascara vs.massacre

tact vs. tack

your vs. yore

aloud vs.allowed

lo vs. low

canon vs.cannon

peak vs. peek

ensure vs.insure

Claus vs.Clause

marital vs.martial

wanton vs.wonton

            Did you know them all?  Did you reallyknow them all, or are you just sort of aware that these are two different words?  If I picked one of these pairs at random, could you tell me the difference between these words?

            For example, Amazon once offered a LEGO AT-AT for sale which came with possible legs.  I’ve lost track of how many authors I’ve seen fire canons at me, often back in the days of your.  And if we’re talking about late night encounters, would you rather be writing about a peek experience or a peakexperience?  Depending on your personal preferences, either one might pique your interest, but they’d be two fairly different things.  And when I try to bring these points up in discussion, somebody almost always tries to change tact.

            If I want to be a writer, I have to know words.  I have to love them.  Words need to be to me what clay is to a sculptor.  A sculptor can tell the difference between clay and plasticene, between green stuff and Fimo, and between Sculpey and Play-Doh.  I need to know the difference between they’re, there, and their.  I need to understand that infighting and inciting aren’t remotely the same thing.

            I need a better-than-working vocabulary.  I need to be able to spell.  Me, not my spellchecker. Because my spellchecker is an idiot, and idiots make lousy writing partners.

            Next time, I’d like to challenge you with something we haven’t talked about in a while.

            Okay, this is late.  A week and a day.  Do you want excuses?  I was away at New York Comic Con and then came home to layouts I needed to go over, on top of all the things I just needed to get caught up on. 

            So, that ate up some time.  Sorry.

            Anyway, I’ve mentioned this idea before, but a few recent blog posts and comments I’ve seen made me want to bring it up again.  If we’re going to talk about writing, we need to agree that any such discussion is going to get broken down into either rules or advice.  Or drinking, but that’s not relevant right now.

            Right now, I’d like to talk about the rules.

            Rules are things that all of us, as writers, have to learn.  No questions.  I need to learn what words mean and how to spell them.  I must have a firm understanding of grammar.  A solid grasp of structure is required.  Characters have to hit certain benchmarks. You may notice these things come up again and again when discussing good writing.  There’s a reason for that, and it’s not that professional writers and publishers and editors are all jerks.  Learning the rules means study and practice and failure and more study and more practice and more failure. 

            Why do I bring this up?

            See, I brought up the rules because they’re a good lead in to what I actually wanted to talk about.  Exceptions.  Those cases where the rules don’t apply. Some people love exceptions.  They approach them two different ways, but usually to get the same result.

            Allow me to explain.

            The thing about rules, as so many people have said, is that I have to learn them so I can understand when and where and how to break them.  Because all the rules are breakable.  Never doubt that.  Pick any rule I mention above, or any other rule I’ve ever blabbered on about here.  Mention it in the comments and I’m sure some of the other folks here can give a dozen examples
            Now, some folks think if the rules can be broken anyway, well, why should I bother learning them?  Richard Matheson and Daniel Keyes wrote stories with lots of spelling mistakes. Cormac McCarthy and Peter Stenson don’t use much punctuation.  If they don’t need to do all this, why should I bother learning it?
            Y’see, this mentality means I’m looking at the exceptions, not at the rule.  Yeah, I can point to a handful of stories that break the rules, but I can also point to tens of thousands that don’t.  More importantly, I can point to hundreds of thousands that broke them and were rejected for it.

            Here’s another way to think of this.  Driving a car means following the speed limit.  The exact numbers vary from state-to state, but we all acknowledge that driving in a school zone requires that I travel at a certain speed. So does going through a residential area or traveling on a freeway.  Makes sense, yes?

            An experienced driver knows there are situations where I can flex those rules, though.  There are times I can go a little faster through school zones or residential areas and not worry about it.  In all honesty, I’ve driven over seventy on the highway next to a police officer and only gotten a raised eyebrow.  A lot of you probably have similar stories.

            And yet… none of us are assuming traffic laws and speed limits no longer apply to us.  We just know how to work within the framework of the laws and when we can step outside of it.  We know the rules and we know how and when to break them.
            Contrast that with the guy who goes roaring through a residential area at 70mph in the middle of the day… and then gets annoyed with the officer who pulls him over.  He’s assuming he’s the exception.  He’s doing the same thing I did, but… he’s really not, is he?

            I can’t start with the assumption that I’m the exception.  That the rules or requirements don’t apply to me.  I’m always going to be bound by the same rules as every other writer, and I’m going to be expected to follow them.  Until I show that I know how to break them.  If I don’t know what I’m doing or why, I’m just a monkey pounding on a typewriter, unable to explain how or why I did something and also probably unable to do it again.

            Also, monkeys do not get paid well.

            Now, there’s another mentality I’ve encountered a lot of online.  This is that other way of viewing exceptions that I was talking about.   They’re the folks who use the exception to the rule as a means of dismissing the rule as a whole.  For example, you say every writer needs editing.  Except, I say, Yakko published his book without editing and it did very well.  Ipso facto, writers do not need to edit.  That rule’s out the window and can be ignored. I could probably give a dozen examples of this without trying, I just don’t feel like writing them all out.  Besides, you’ve probably seen them, too.  Everything I mentioned as a rule up above—and dozens more—there’s someone, somewhere right now arguing that’s a stupid rule that this exception proves doesn’t matter.

            Now, to be clear again, I’m not saying these exceptions don’t exist. That’d be silly—they clearly do.  But it’s important to understand that they are the exception. They’re the unusual rarity, not the common thing.  That’s why we’ve heard of them.  Just because there were a hundred news stories about a writer who turned in a handwritten manuscript on yellow legal pads and got it accepted does not mean the publishing industry prefers handwritten manuscripts or legal pads.  We’re only hearing about it because it’s such an oddball thing to happen.

            Now, I try to point out such things when I can, and I think I’ve been pretty open all along on the ranty blog that exceptions do happen.  But I don’t really push them. Honestly, if I had to offer or explain every exception to every rule, this blog probably never would’ve made it past the second or third post.  And each one would be the equivalent of thirty or forty pages long.  This is kind of a teaching 101 thing.  As I said above, you learn the rules, then you learn the exceptions to the rules. 

            Y’see, Timmy, exceptions don’t disprove the rule—they prove it.  Always.  If not editing or handwritten legal pad manuscripts actually demonstrated that these rules don’t matter, then shouldn’t we be seeing hundreds of examples?  Maybe thousands?

            And yet, we don’t.  The majority of our examples are still people following those basic rules.  And flexing them here and there where they can.

            So why do some people do this?  Why do they convince people to ignore the rules?  We could probably debate that for a while.  Regardless, it’s kind of like looking at a thousand cancer patients, finding that one person who spontaneously went into remission, and then loudly declaring no one needs chemo or to get those growths removed—cancer cures itself!  First, it’s just plain wrong. Second, it belittles the 999 other people who are all struggling to do things the right way and undermines the folks trying to help them.

            Exceptions are great.  They’re why all of us can do so much as writers.  But exceptions can’t be my excuse not to learn.  All these rules have developed over the decades for a reason, and they apply to all of us.

            No exceptions.

            Next time, I’d like to take a quick minute to reveal something.

            Until then… go write.