Comment by phantasmish
1 month ago
Obsession with short sentences and generally pushing extreme simplicity of structure and word choice has been terrible for English prose. It’s not been terrible because most people aren’t aided by such guidance (most are) but because the same people who can’t be trusted to wield a quill without the bumper-lanes installed see a sentence longer than ten words, or a semicolon, or god forbid literate and appropriate nuanced and expressive word choice and dismiss it as bad. This stunts their growth as both readers and writers.
… though, yes, in average hands a “proceeded to”, and most of the quoted phrases, are garbage. Drilling the average student on trying to make their language superficially “smarter” is a comically bad idea, and is indeed the opposite of what almost all of them need.
> strode purposefully
My wife (a writer) has noticed that fanfic and (many, anyway—plus, I mean, big overlap between these two groups) romance authors loooove this in particular, for whatever reason. Everyone “strides” everywhere. No one can just fucking walk, ever, and it’s always “strode”. It’s a major tell for a certain flavor of amateur.
"He walked up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He strode up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He sidled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He tromped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
Each of those sentences conveys as slightly different action. You can almost imagine the person's face has a different expression in each version.
Yes, I hate it when amateurs just search/replace by thesaurus. But I think different words have different connotations, even if they mean roughly the same thing. Writing would be poorer if we only ever used "walk".
I know you know everything I'm about to write, but I read a lot of dubious quality fiction. It needs to be made clear that if the butler "strides" up to Helen, then I, the reader, am expecting him to eject her from the party, tell her that her car is on fire, or something equally dramatic. The writer can subvert this expectation, but must at least acknowledge that it exists. The butler can stride up to Helen with a self-important sniff and welcome her to the house, but he can't just stride up for no reason: the striding must be explained and it must be relevant to the rest of the story.
Conveying meaning is the whole problem here. An unexpected word choice is a neon sign saying "This is important!" and it disappoints the reader if it is not.
Yes, that's a great way of explaining it, and I 100% agree.
People shouldn't use "strides" just because "walked" is boring. They should use "strides" when it's meaningful in the context of the story.
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Between stride and walk, it seems like it would be unusual for any character in a romance novel to merely walk rather than stride. If anything the simple walk would need explanation.
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The Hawaiian language has a concept called Kaona, which is essentially embedding deeper meanings in contextual word choices. It can go way beyond the literal meaning of the words, and tie into bigger concepts of culture, lineage, and places. It's super cool hearing about it from native speakers.
We don't really do it intentionally in English, at least to the same degree. But there's still a lot of information coded in our word and grammar choices.
In English the word is “connotation.”
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Feel like this debate might be way different for novel writing vs every day writing.
I’m biased because I am not a very good writer, but I can see why in a book you might want to hint at how someone walked up to someone else to illustrate a point.
When writing articles to inform people, technical docs, or even just letters, don’t use big vocabulary to hint at ideas. Just spell it out literally.
Any other way of writing feels like you are trying to be fancy just for the sake of seeming smart.
>> Just spell it out literally.
Spelling it out literally is precisely what the GP is doing in each of the example sentences — literally saying what the subject is doing, and with the precision of choosing a single word better to convey not only the mere fact of bipedal locomotion, but also the WAY the person walked, with what pace, attitude, and feeling.
This carries MORE information about in the exact same amount of words. It is the most literal way to spell it out.
A big part of good writing is how to convey more meaning without more words.
Bad writing would be to add more clauses or sentences to say that our subject was confidently striding, conspiratorially sidling, or angrily tromping, and adding much more of those sentences and phrases soon gets tiresome for the reader. Better writing carries the heavier load in the same size sentence by using better word choice, metaphor, etc. (and doing it without going too far the other way and making the writing unintelligibly dense).
Think of "spelling it out literally" like the thousand-line IF statements, whereas good writing uses a more concise function to produce the desired output.
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Non-native English speaker here.
I would not understand the last two sentences. Sidle? Tromp? I don't think I've seen these words enough times for them to register in my mind.
"Strode", I would probably understand after a few seconds of squeezing my brain. I mean, I sort of know "stride", but not as an action someone would take. Rather as the number of bytes a row of pixels takes in a pixel buffer. I would have to extrapolate what the original "daily English" equivalent must have been.
English is hard, even for native speakers. But it's also wonderful! English loves to steal words from other languages, and good writers love to choose the right word. It's like having an expansive wardrobe and picking just the right outfit for every event.
Bad writers, of course, pick a word to make them seem smarter (which, of course, often fails). That's what the OP was complaining about: using a fancy word just to impress.
But "stride" is not just a fancy version of "walk". When a person strides they are taking big steps; their head is held high, and they are confident in who they are and where they're going.
"Sidle" is the opposite. A person who sidles is timid and meek; they walk slowly, or maybe sideways, hoping that no one will notice them.
And "tromp," of course, sounds like something heavy and dour. A person who tromps stamps their feet with every step; you hear them coming. They are angry or maybe clumsy and graceless.
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That works transversally accross languages though
You can always choose uncommon more descriptive words
In spanish you could say "repare algo" ("I fixed") or "parapetee algo" ("I Jury-rigged") and plenty would not know of the cuff what the second one means
People either know, look it up or figure it out via context
Mark Twain on this subject:
> Well, also he will notice in the course of time, as his reading goes on, that the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
But also:
> Unconsciously he accustoms himself to writing short sentences as a rule. At times he may indulge himself with a long one, but he will make sure that there are no folds in it, no vaguenesses, no parenthetical interruptions of its view as a whole.
Very much agree. In the rush to "simplify" writing, we've stripped out a lot of the colour in the prose and made it boring. Sentences have a certain rhythm which becomes even more apparent when they're read out loudly or performed by someone with good vocal training.
I can see the appeal in, perhaps, technical writing but even there, I feel that there's room to make the prose more colourful.
You forgot:
"He waddled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He scrambled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He kick-flipped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
[edit] electric-slid! Pirouetted! Somersaulted!
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Even more simply:
"God rest ye merry gentlemen" changes in tone and meaning depending on where you put the comma in that sentence.
My best guess is they lean so hard on “strode” because they are trying to convey “this character is confident” and aren’t very good at it. So you’ll get like ten “strodes” in a short novel. Everyone’s “strode”ing into every room they enter.
"minced" would never be used in such fiction.
I have a confession to make.
I hope ChatGPT starts writing only short sentences.
Punchy one-liners.
One thought per line.
So marketers finally realize this does not work.
And stop sending me junk emails written like this.
Having read a fair amount of Faulkner, I have to respectfully disagree. Or, at least, point out that are diminishing returns to flowery, complex writing.
> Drilling the average student on trying to make their language superficially “smarter” is a comically bad idea, and is indeed the opposite of what almost all of them need.
I mean, it seems like it could work if you get to follow it up with a "de-education" step. Phase 1: force them to widen their vocabulary by using as much of it as possible. Phase 2: teach them which words are actually appropriate to use.
The internet has been even worse. We tend to speak literally and simply. And I don't really know why that is. Perhaps it's because if there's something beyond the overt, it might go completely missed.
For instance Mark Twain is basically full of endless amazing quotes with lovely nuance, yet in contemporary times how many people would miss the meaning in a statement like "Prosperity is the best protector of principle"? I can already see people raging over his statement, taken at face value. Downvote the classist!
"Prosperity is the best protector of principle" taken out of context can be used in many ways, including by a rich person arguing that rich people have better morals, and poor people have worse ones, and that's why they're poor.
The context is really necessary.
Whether one is trying to use it literally or ironically, it means the exact same thing. The only question is whether the speaker and the reader understand what it means. And in fact in this case there was no context at all in Twain's original usage - it was the epigraph for a chapter in this work. [1]
And that's what I mean in that modern writing, on the internet - though rapidly leaking into 'real life', has become highly infantilized where we assume everybody reading is an idiot, and speak accordingly which, in turn, infantilizes and 'idiotizes' our own speech, and simply makes it far more bland and less expressive.
Interestingly, this is not ubiquitous. In other cultures, including on the internet, there remains much more use of irony, and more general nuance in speech. I suspect a big part of the death of English fluency was driven by political correctness - zomg what if somebody interprets what I'm saying the wrong way!?!
[1] - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/2895-h.htm
Another annoying fact is that using a bit rarer words sometimes triggers weirdos into thinking you somehow want to brag or use that kind of language to "look smarter". Like a crab bucket for language.
I consider myself fluent in English, I watch technical talks and casual youtubers on English daily, and this is the first time I encounter this word lol.
The only "stride" I know relates to the gap betweeb heterogeneous elements in a contiguous array
> I consider myself fluent in English, I watch technical talks and casual youtubers on English daily, and this is the first time I encounter this word lol.
> The only "stride" I know relates to the gap betweeb heterogeneous elements in a contiguous array
I am also not a native English speaker, but I got to know the verb to "to stride" from The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn is originally introduced under the name "Strider":
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aragorn&oldid=132...
"Aragorn is a fictional character and a protagonist in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn is a Ranger of the North, first introduced with the name Strider and later revealed to be the heir of Isildur, an ancient King of Arnor and Gondor."
Or since we're in a techie forum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strider_(1989_arcade_game)
Or if you spent any time on an elliptical or treadmill.
People don't discuss how people walk in daily conversation, so it's a word primarily encountered in literature, and more common in specific types of literature (like romance novels to describe how a man paces about with swagger).
I was a hurdler in high school and mastering stride length was almost the entire point of practicing. It's equally weird to me to see someone claiming to be fluent in English who has never heard the word. Maybe a reminder that we're not as knowledgeable as we think we are and what we choose to consume on YouTube is a tiny smittance of human experience. Running is a fairly universal and important thing for nearly any land animal, hardly a niche thing to talk about, but if you had ever talked to or listened to runners speaking English, you'd have definitely heard them talking about their strides.
Verbal fluency is a completely different ballgame to literary fluency. Literature uses vastly more words. Stride is a pretty common one.
Open a collegiate dictionary to a series of random pages, checking the first word to see if you can give any vague definition of it. A fluent speaker who doesn't read literature will likely be able to for fewer than 1/4th of them. A decent literary vocabulary would know ~2/3 or more imo.
I wonder if you've heard the expression "hitting your stride".
(native english speaker who was a bookworm as a kid; I admittedly had to ask gemini to recall the general phrase that I had in mind)
Nope, never heard!
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Indeed "to stride" is roughly to walk with a larger than normal distance (gap) between steps.