Category: spelling

Yep. It’s that time again.

I figured I was about do to talk abut spelling, as I due every sex months or so. It’s on of those things that needs to get hammered home again ant again, because no mater how many tines I say it, their is still this huge grope of people who incest that smelling doesn’t really effect how an editor vies you’re writing. Either that or they fill back on the hole “language evolves” defense.

Now, sum of you may bee giggling or filling a bite smug rite about now. After all, hear I am gong on about you’re bad spilling habits and halt of these wards are spelled wrong. Except, you seen, they aren’t. Not won singlet thin is spilled wrong inn these too paragraphs.

Which is the point I’m trying to make.

Y’see, Timmy, spellcheckers are idiots. Forget Watson or Deep Blue, your spellcheck program can be outwitted by my three-week old nephew banging on the keyboard with his little palms. Anyone depending on their spellchecker to save them from mistakes like the thirty-five in those first two paragraphs is doomed to a lot of rejection letters.

Yup, thirty-five. Count ‘em up. Keep counting until you find them all.

Of course, this doesn’t address the real problem. A lot of people don’t just have crappy spelling, they’ve got crappy vocabularies, too. When the idiot spellcheck suggests a word, these folks blindly accept it because they don’t really know which word they wanted in the first place. Which, if you think about it, is a bit like two homeless guys giving each other advice on the stock market.

So, let’s have a pop quiz. Pencils out, grab that spare Netflix envelope off the television, and let’s begin.

vicious or viscous — One of these words applies to wolverines.

cords or chords – One of these words deals with electronics.

sheer or shear — One of these words means see-through.

very or vary – One of these words means to change.

yore or your – One of these words applies to the past.

peak, peek, or pique — One of these words means the top.

discrete or discreet — One of these words applies to manners.

it’s or its – One (and only one) of these words is possessive.

corporeal or corpulent – One of these words means solid.

their, there, or they’re – One of these words is also a possessive.

trusty or trustee – One of these words is a person’s title.

canon or cannon — One of these is a big gun.

reign, rein, or rain – One of these words deals with emperors.

compliment or complement – One of these words means that things work well together.

So, got all your answers? Are you ready to grade this little test?

Well, here’s the catch. You’ll notice I never said what you were supposed to do. If you managed to pick the right words, that’s only part of the quiz.

You need to know all the words, what they mean, and how to use them correctly. Every single one of them. Knowing one out of three or even half of them doesn’t cut it because every one of those words is going to breeze past your spell check program without a problem– no matter which word you meant to write.

Bonus questions. Which one of the above words is a verb that means to cut? Which one’s an adjective that means thick? How about the musical noun? Which one of those words is best applied to a pile of books?

None of these should be hard questions. Seriously. These aren’t obscure words.

As I’ve mentioned before, there are lots of people who will try to convince everyone that the words you use and how you spell them does not matter in real writing. Spelling is all arbitrary, anyway, right? Such pedestrian things should be the very least of your worries.

There also a lot of people who fall back on the “language evolves,” excuse, as I brought up at the start. Modern English is not the same as Middle English or Old English. They also like to bring up Shakespeare as an example of someone who made up words that are now in common use today. Going with today’s theme of knowing what words mean, let me point out that ignorance is not a synonym for evolution.

Now, there are also lots and lots of people who have never been published, produced, or made the first cut in a writing contest. By an astonishing coincidence, a very large percentage of this group is made up of members of those first two groups.

What are the odds of that, I wonder…?

Y’see, Timmy, I know what all those words up there mean. Each and every one of them. So do most editors. Which means we will know when they’re used incorrectly, and each one’s another check mark in the “this writer doesn’t know what they’re doing” column.

How many checks do you think you’ll get before your manuscript ends up in that big pile on the left?

Stop asking your computer to write. Go buy a dictionary. Use it.

Next time, as I have a few times before, I’d like to look at one of the seminal influences of my childhood and where–in my opinion–it went horribly wrong. Even though I somehow managed to turn out okay.

Well, more or less.

Until then, go right.

Hey! It’s contest season again, isn’t it?

Technically it’s always contest season, yeah, but it’s the start of the year and a couple of the big ones are opening their doors for new submissions. So, as I often do at this time of year, I was going to offer a few insights into things that make all those contest readers want to put a gun in their mouth.

Well, that’s probably a bit extreme. There are some really awful scripts out there, but you can rest assured none of them are going to drive a reader to suicide. Murder, maybe, but not suicide.

Now, as I’ve said many times before, none of these mistakes are sure-fire ways to lose. But they’re all things that make readers roll their eyes and reach for the Captain Morgans, which means it just got that much harder to impress those readers. So keep that in mind before you fill out an entry form and maybe give your masterpiece one more good look. I mean, really look at it

Spelling — Yeah, I’m harping on this again. There’ll probably be a whole post coming up sometime in the near future.

Because it matters, that’s why.

Over the course of a few years I wrote two different contest columns for Creative Screenwriting, interviewed dozens of contest directors, and asked each of them about tips for aspiring entrants. Across the board, the first thing most of them said was spelling and grammar.

Now, a random typo doesn’t mean you blew it. We all make mistakes, and readers know that, too. If they go through and find a their on page 42 when it should be there, they’re going to cluck their tongues but keep reading. If there’s a typo on every page, though… Heck, there were a few screenplays I looked at where I wasn’t even thirty pages in and I’d lost track of how many there were.

Whenever you hand off a manuscript you’re trying to convince the reader that you’re a real writer. Someone who can do more with words than just sign their name, scribble a shopping list, or send a txt mssg (ROFL LOL STFU). The absolute, bare-bones basic tools of writing – any writing– are vocabulary, spelling, and grammar. Which means you need to master them, not your spellchecker. If you establish early on that you can’t handle the basics, why would a reader look any farther?

Apostrophe S — You could argue this goes under spelling, but speaking as someone who’s read a thousand or so scripts by aspiring screenwriters, I can say it’s in a class by itself. Messing up an apostrophe S stands out like a flare to anyone who knows how to use it. As I said above, we all make mistakes now and then, but it’s painfully obvious when a writer’s just throwing down random apostrophes and getting a few right by sheer chance.

Knowing the difference between a plural, a possessive, and a contraction is past basic—it’s a fundamental part of the English language. Stop writing, go get a grammar book–even a fun one like Eats Shoots & Leaves (look at the carousel down below)–and actually read it. Promise yourself that as of this moment there will be no more guessing or wild stabs in the dark.

Logic holes — A friend of mine called me once, laughing in hysterics. He was reading for a contest and was halfway through a sci-fi script where human colonists were struggling with the affects of a war that had taken place 200 years earlier. The enemy had released a bio-weapon that wiped out pre-pubescents, so every generation of colonists had lost all their children for the past two centuries.

Give it a second. You’ll start laughing, too.

You’ve probably heard of “movie logic,” a term which also applies to television and even prose. It’s when the writer bends the laws of common sense to solve an issue or a problem. As long as you don’t look at it too close, movie logic can usually get skimmed over and carry you to the next scene or paragraph.

The flipside of this is a complete lack of logic, which makes readers call their friends to share the joke. A lack of logic knocks the reader out of the story, which means it breaks the flow of the story. And that gets scripts put in the big pile on the left.

Fortune Cookie Talk — Also sometimes called Confucius-speak by another friend of mine. This is when a screenwriter tries to cut down their page count by cutting all the articles, “small” words, and transitional bits from their script. I think there’s also a misguided belief that this gives their writing more “punch.”

Neo walks streets. Man pulls gun. Neo dodges. Drives kick into man’s chest. Man out cold. Neo is One.

Trust me, there are only two things this leads to. One is annoyance as the story slowly edges into unreadable. Two is laughter. Not the good kind of laughter. The “all the kids die every generation for 200 years” kind of laughter.

The Squashed Script — Sometimes the writer refuses to make any more cuts (for conscious reasons or sheer denial) and ends up with a 170-or-so page script. So they change the font size or the margins or the line spacing and crush the script down into an acceptable number of pages. After all, going from 12 to 9 point Courier can shrink a 170 page script down to 130 pages. That’s a fine length for a script, right?

This is annoying on a bunch of levels. First and foremost, if any writer is manipulating their script like this, it means they know their script is unacceptably long and they’re making no real effort to fix the problem. Second, it shows that the writer is assuming the readers won’t realize what’s going on (and why), which is kind of arrogant if you think about it.

Believe me, readers love arrogant writers who assume they’re idiots. It makes the job soooo much easier.

(not in a good way, in case the sarcasm wasn’t showing…)

Reality is What You Make It — More often than not, either the title or final page of this screenplay assures the reader that this tale is, in fact, based on the true accounts of me/ my best friend/ my brother/ my parents/ my grandparents/ someone I read about in a magazine article. These are tales of cancer, disease, genocide, military struggles, marital struggles, crises of faith, and various other conflicts of this world we live in. Alas, sometimes they’re also about struggling writers searching for someone to recognize their genius. Often, the fact this is all true is stressed to give a certain validity and gravitas to the screenplay.

Thing is, it doesn’t matter if the story is true or not. Nobody cares. They just care if it’s a good story and it’s well-told. And in that respect, a tale of an orphaned cancer survivor in Rwanda needs to stand up against the story of a black-ops secret agent who teams up with prehistoric lizard men from Atlantis to save the world from a zombie apocalypse. Whether or not its true is irrelevant. In the end, you’re telling a story, and it’s either going to have its own validity or it isn’t. Reality just doesn’t enter into the equation for the reader, so it can’t for the writer.

Frankenanite — A large percentage of genre scripts involve nanites which somehow go rogue and endanger mankind. Don’t know what a nanite is? No problem–a couple of these writers don’t either. If you’re writing a genre screenplay about nanites (or something indistinguishable from nanites like genetically-altered bacteria or something) think carefully. If I had to pick the ten most overused plot devices, these little guys would be in the top three.

Epic — Avoid the word epic. The only time the word epic should appear in your script is if someone in the script is telling a very overblown story. It’s a word for critics, publicists, and producers. Screenwriters can use it in interviews, but not in their writing.

Orbs — No orbs. You would not believe how much this word is overused. People throw it in everywhere because they think it’s better than pedestrian words like round or sphere. Much like mellonballer is guaranteed to get you a Nicholl Fellowship, using the word orb to describe eyes, mystical stones, the sun, or pretty much anything else will make the reader shake their head and pour themselves a second drink. Then they will pour a third drink onto your script and set fire to it.

To Be Continued — You get one script to impress someone with. One. Nobody wins anything with the first of an epic trilogy (see above). That one manuscript has to stand on its own. Ending a screenplay – especially a contest entry screenplay- with “to be continued” hammers home the fact that this is an incomplete tale. It tells the reader you had no idea how to end this story in 120 pages.

Remember, The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Highlander were not written as trilogies. Despite everything you may have heard, neither was Star Wars. Every one of these films was conceived of, written, and shot as a lone entity. They had to stand alone and succeed alone. If they had to do it that way, don’t think for a minute that your story won’t have to.

And there you have it. Ten ways you can make a reader sigh and shake their head in disdain. Which really means this is ten ways you can avoid getting the head shake, and that means your manuscript is that much closer to dodging the big pile on the left and ending up in the right pile.

Next time… well, I’m not sure what I’m going to rant about next time. But there will be a point to it, I assure you.

Until then, go write.

I would love to tell you I’m late with this post because I’ve been getting ready for one of my oldest friend’s wedding tomorrow back here in New England. John and Holly are finally getting hitched.

Or I’d be thrilled to say this is late because I’m having such a wild time at Horror Realm 2010 promoting Ex-Heroes and/ or The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe. This place rocks.

Yep. I would love to tell you either of those things.

Moving on.

I’d like to do a little math trick for you. You’ve seen these before, right? Start here, add this, multiply that, and I predict your answer. Sound familiar?

Let me give you another example. Divide 8 by 5. Add 3. This should give you the famous answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything.

Wait, division’s the one where you make that many more of something, right? That’s multiplication? Sorry. Okay, let’s try it again.

Multiply 8 by 5. Add 3. Now you should have it, and it’s also one of the mystic numbers from LOST.

Still no?

Did I type 3? I meant to hit 2. Well, no big deal on that one. You got it from context, right?

Of course, it is a big deal, isn’t it? Screwing up numbers can have dire consequences. Misunderstand a term or toss in the wrong digit and suddenly the door doesn’t fit right on your jumbo jet. Chase hikes your interest rate by 23% or more. Your space probe misses the planet Venus and goes flying off into deep space. Yes, if it’s in a key place just one digit off could mean you miss a whole planet. Or worse yet… don’t miss it.

Granted, there’s always that brave scientist who strikes out on his own without checking his work or having anyone else go over their ideas. A whole slew of movies were made about such men back in the ‘50s. We’ve all read stories, fictional and true, about the people who didn’t double check their math, and most of these stories end in tragedy. Heck, all you need to look at the financial section of your paper to see what happens when bankers don’t pay attention to what’s actually on the page in front of them.

This is why you always hear about scientists, engineers, and bankers checking and rechecking and re-rechecking their figures. Then they hand those numbers and equations off to a colleague for him or her to check and recheck them. Finally, once their work’s been confirmed, they’ll talk about building a new plane or flying to another planet. Not knowing your numbers and sums means you don’t really have a hope of succeeding in one of these fields. You might be able to manage something small, but the big jobs are always going to end up going to the people who can just do this stuff, not the ones who are completely dependent on their calculators to do every single calculation for them.

Of course, this isn’t just true of numbers. Messing up a word or a letter can have dire consequences, too. Especially for writers.

Just as a scientist or engineer is expected to know their numbers so they can make something solid, a writer is expected to know spelling and definitions to make something worth reading. This is why I stress spelling and vocabulary here again and again and again. Hands down, the most common flaw in amateur manuscripts is misspelled and misused words.

I mentioned calculators before and, well, it was a calculated choice. I’m sure a few folks are already in the comments section pointing out that most scientists–even the very top cream-of-the-crop ones– do use calculators. They use them all the time. And they do, I’d be a fool to argue the point.

So how, you ask, is that any different from the people who depend on the spell-checker to do it all for them?

Y’see, Timmy, the difference is that the scientists are just using calculators as a time-saver. They know how to plug in all the formulas, how to work the equations, and how to do the math. If you ever sat in on a college physics class, this is why all those equations get put up on the board. These folks can do the problem out by hand on three or four sheets of paper… or they can punch the numbers in and get the answer.

This is not the same thing as the would-be writer who doesn’t know the difference between its and it’s or there and their and they’re or something bigger like corporeal and corpulent. If a writer is misusing these words it’s not that they’re saving time with spellchecker–they want spellchecker to know these things for them.

I’ve mentioned this several times before, but I’ll say it again. Buy a dictionary. There’s one or two nice big ones on the carousel at the bottom of this page. Stop depending on your spell-checker and make a point of looking up a word if you’re not sure how it’s spelled or what it means. Odds are you’ll never have to look up that word again, and you’ll remember whatever it was that made you trip up on the spelling.

If nothing else, you’ll impress friends with that big, solid book on your desk.

Next time, I’m going to rant about your friends and family. Really.

Until then… do the math. Go write.

Today’s ranty blog takes us to the land of imagination. To be exact, the airport of imagination. Say you’re a passenger on the new supersonic jumbo jet I designed. I call it the OmniTurboTron 3000. It’s going to make the Concorde obsolete. And you’re here to ride on one of the very first flights, the maiden voyage. The rest of the passengers are on board, the luggage is packed below, and the flight crew goes to close the door.

Oh, but there’s a problem. The door’s not quite the right shape for the frame. It’s built to all the specs, but it doesn’t seem to fit. That’s odd.

The crew wrestles with it for a while and finally figure out if they use some crowbars to lift it a bit on the hinges it mostly fits into place. They just need to whack it with a sledge a once or thrice and it sits almost perfectly. Well, maybe with a few blankets pushed into that crack on the bottom.

The question for you is… are you going to stay on this plane?

Heck, if I’m supposed to be an engineer and I messed up something as simple as the door, what else is wrong? Is this cabin airtight? Are the windows safe? It seems like I didn’t run any kind of tests or double-check anything–maybe the wings are going to come off in mid-flight!

Believe it or not, the same logic and conclusions are true of writing. If a reader hits something which shows I didn’t check any of this or don’t even know what something does, why should they risk going any farther? If I don’t even know how to spell or use an apostrophe, who knows what kind of plot holes were left behind when I declared this “done” and put it out for people to see. Why would any editor (let alone any reader) risk their time with something like this when there are signs of shoddy workmanship right up front?

Y’see, Timmy, if I skim the page and see Wakko is playing a few cords to compliment the music the band is perforating over their, do I really need to read anything else? That’s four failures in one sentence.

Yes, four. If you can’t see them, pick up a dictionary.

No, not spell check. Not the internet, either. A real dictionary.

I know I’ve gone on about this again and again. Spelling is the number one thing I tell people to work on here. Just look how many links the keyword “spelling” has over there on the right. You cannot succeed at this until you learn what words mean and how to spell them. Not more or less what they mean. Not close enough with the spelling so people will know what you mean. You have to know and you have to be right.

I also know I push owning a dictionary a lot, which seems a bit pointless in our wonderful space age world, but there’s a rhyme to my reason. A dictionary and the internet are not the same thing. If you have to look something up in the dictionary, you are the one doing the work. When you do the work, you learn. Once you’ve learned, you rarely need to look it up again. Like any skill set, your writing improves with study and practice. You need both.

When your computer does the work, you become more dependent on your computer. As I’ve pointed out many times now, a computer is the worst writing partner you can choose. It has no idea what word you wanted to use, only what words you’re close to. This is why people who use spell check all the time continue to use it and continue to need it. Same goes for the folks who tend to Google-search for definitions rather than looking them up. They’re not studying how to write–only practicing.

And practice without study is like that idiot guy in the park swinging his katana around and convinced he’s learning to be a ninja.

Yeah, you know that guy…

Now, there’re some great arguments out there that people don’t need to know this stuff anymore because computers do it for them. It’s my firm belief this is why there’ been such a boom in would-be-writers lately.

Thing is, we’re not talking about people. We’re talking about you. And if you’re spending any amount of time here reading the ranty blog, the assumption is you want to be a writer who can actually sell something. As a writer, you must know how to spell and what words mean.

There’s a huge difference between an engineer and someone who owns a copy of The Way Things Work. Just because I’ve got few friends I can call to help with car repair does not qualify me as a mechanic. Taking a health class in high school and owning a first aid book does not make you a doctor. More to the fact, we’d all mercilessly mock (maybe even sue) anyone who tried to call themselves an engineer, a mechanic, or a doctor based on these “abilities.”

Likewise, if you’re going to say you’re a writer because your computer knows all the right words and spellings, don’t expect a lot of people to take you seriously. Because in their eyes, you’re just that guy in the park, wearing a black tee-shirt and swinging your katana…

Next time, I would like to tell you all a 100% true story about a baby discovering her own feet. Really.

Until then, go write.