Fixed!
I thought my editor hated me the first time he put my book in the red sea. The second time, I thanked him: proofreading and editing are time consuming and only someone who gives a shit about you will spend the time to do a proper job of it.
I save all my marked up text and review past edits on a regular basis. If someone took the time to show me my mistakes, I owe it to them to do all I can to avoid repeating those same mistakes.
Nice editing, LoK. I really like the use of concise vocabulary.
“Robust” writing (I mean the Orwellian/ Economist guides) is great for journalism, and getting your ideas across as efficiently as possible. Orwell was a journalist/ essayist.
But there is a place for ornate writing. Scott-Moncrieff’s sentences are often epic. Take this example from “Swann’s Way” - his translation of Proust’s first volume.
“A few feet away, a strapping great lad in livery stood musing,
motionless, statuesque, useless, like that purely decorative warrior
whom one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna’s paintings, lost in
dreams, leaning upon his shield, while all around him are fighting and
bloodshed and death; detached from the group of his companions who were
thronging about Swann, he seemed as determined to remain unconcerned in
the scene, which he followed vaguely with his cruel, greenish eyes, as
if it had been the Massacre of the Innocents or the Martyrdom of Saint
James. He seemed precisely to have sprung from that vanished race–if,
indeed, it ever existed, save in the reredos of San Zeno and the
frescoes of the Eremitani, where Swann had come in contact with it, and
where it still dreams–fruit of the impregnation of a classical statue
by some one of the Master’s Paduan models, or of Albert Duerer’s Saxons.
And the locks of his reddish hair, crinkled by nature, but glued to his
head by brilliantine, were treated broadly as they are in that Greek
sculpture which the Mantuan painter never ceased to study, and which,
if in its creator’s purpose it represents but man, manages at least to
extract from man’s simple outlines such a variety of richness, borrowed,
as it were, from the whole of animated nature, that a head of hair,
by the glossy undulation and beak-like points of its curls, or in the
overlaying of the florid triple diadem of its brushed tresses, can
suggest at once a bunch of seaweed, a brood of fledgling doves, a bed of
hyacinths and a serpent’s writhing back”
I’m speechless.
Somehow it seems that a successful humorous reply in passive voice has yet to be posted.
And yet Dianetics continues to sell, Dan Brown prattles unabated, and Atlas Shrugged makes giant pricks of yet another generation of mid-sized, economy minded pricks.
Quoted for fucking truth.
Sunday/monday/tuesday is my super busy time at work, so pardon my slow replies thus far. I’m planning to spend some time later in the week focusing on this :)
In that case, it is to be hoped that God will help us all.
Heh - translating Scott-Moncrieff into journalese, I come up with:
“I saw a big youth. I thought he looked like a Greek statue”
Thank you! I try to be brief without sacrificing vital information. Among other benefits, it keeps the writing department’s foreign language translation costs within budget. Translation is very expensive.
Alright so then it’s settled. Lunch of Kong, I’ll send all of my stuff to you for editing from now on! :P
I’m sending that in to the next Bulwer-Lytton contest.
If Twitter can instill brevity in a generation, we’ll be better off.
As absurd as it my sound, I recommend tweeting.
Also, disguise your inadequacies with attempts at humor.
I kinda write for a living (I’m an academic) and I too have struggled with issues of passive voice. But I find this absolutely stellar advice. Wish LK had said this to me some 15 years ago.
I really like the Orwell essay that LK linked. Here’s chapter 1 of the book Less Than Words Can Say by Richard Mitchell:
This chapter is about the passive voice, and I find it even more readable (and humorous) than Orwell’s essay.
Furthermore, the very way you consider the world, or the very way in which the world is considered by you, is subtly altered. You used to see a world in which birds ate worms and men made decisions. Now it looks more like a world in which worms are eaten by birds and decisions are made by men. It’s almost a world in which victims are put forward as “doers” responsible for whatever may befall them and actions are almost unrelated to those who perform them. But only almost. The next step is not taken until you learn to see a world in which worms are eaten and decisions made and all responsible agency has disappeared. Now you are ready to be an administrator.
And my favorite bit, from Chapter 3, “A Bunch of Marks”:
Whatever else Churchill may have been doing in those days, he was always providing the English with words. With words he formed their thoughts and emotions. “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills,” said Churchill. Millions answered, apparently, “By God, so we shall.”
Imagine, however, that Churchill had been an ordinary bureaucrat and had chosen to say instead:
Consolidated defensive positions and essential preplanned withdrawal facilities are to be provided in order to facilitate maximum potentialization for the repulsion and/or delay of incursive combatants in each of several preidentified categories of location deemed suitable to the emplacement and/or debarkation of hostile military contingents.
That would, at least, have spared us the pain of wondering what to do about the growing multitudes who can’t seem to read and write English. By now we’d be wondering what to do about the growing multitudes who can’t seem to read and write German.
I think the first page or two of Swann’s Way has some of the most beautiful English prose ever. This despite the fact it’s written in French. I suppose the quality varies per translator, but it’s still exquisite.
That section reproduced by Wisbechlad doesn’t impress me so much, I must say, taken as a whole, but there are some nice sentences within it.
Two of my favorite guides to writing are Twain’s Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses and Safire’s Great Rules of Writing:
Only if you’re looking for journalistic editing that pounds the life out of anything you’re attempting to say.