Discussion On Grammar and Writing Style

I'm curious. Many times I'll see that people seem to be bugged by typos, misspellings, and errors of that nature when criticizing a work grammatically. For me, while those are bothersome, I care much more about things like word choice, awkward phrasing, and purple prose. These things are much harder to do well, but make the writing flow much better, regardless of the typos. In other words, I care more about if the author/translator has a solid understanding of the English language and using it well, as opposed to basic grammatical errors that happen over the course of writing. Which do you care about more and what do you think is essential for you to want to read a story in terms of style/grammar?

 

To fix the things that bother me, editing (rather than proofreading) would be needed. Basically, I agree with OP.

 

I'm not overly bothered by typos, but often they are just a symptom of a much larger problem, including the areas I do care about.

 

Aye, that is indeed the bigger problem. As long as there aren't too many grammar issues, just one here and there, they don't stall reading really. Get broken or unnatural sounding English to the point that it's painful to read, nope.

 

It is true that frequently they come as a package. However, I have seen novels heavily knocked for grammar on RR, where it's mostly minor stuff and the prose itself is solid.

 

I admit that incorrect grammar and spelling does bother me from time to time (especially when ancient novels use rogue instead of rouge) but it doesn't throw me out of a story. When I have to work at it to read it because the phrasing is so bad or paragraphs are awkwardly placed, or, worst case, I feel like it would be easier to mtl the thing, that's when I have a problem.

But I also see that a lot of translators explain that English is not their first language, so is it any wonder that they might not grasp the fine details? And even if it is their first language, I'm just happy they're willing to translate.

 

Depends on the amount of typos in a paragraph, if my eyes start seeing letters that clearly shouldn't be there and they are making the whole writing looks like garbage it will bother everyone.
While, word choice, if used right it can make a novel much better and easy to read

 

Oh my! I just realized I purple the prose out of my writings. I think it's too late for me with so much C radiation affecting me. C radiation from Chinese novels with their flowery words about almost everything. How the scenery is, and the vastness of a certain mountain alongside the overly beautiful texts about the young and old female body with their male counterparts. The simple actions accompanied by change in the atmosphere, and the mysteries behind breathing, walking, sex, and looking with their eyes or mind.

 

For me, dialogue is the most important part to determine whether I want to continue reading or stop.

Typos doesn't really bother me since english is not my mother language.

 

I care more about it being readable rather than getting worked up over something that ultimately isn’t really a big issue. I can let typos go cos you know we all make them mistakes ourselves. Grammar issues I can let go cos I know English may not be all translators’ first language. Heck even people who have learnt English since they were young get it wrong at times. I’ve done it too.

What I have issues with is when they are unable to get across the meaning of what they’re translating. The bulk of it is there but it’s all broken like how you’d find when you read a novel via mtl. Sometimes it might not even be as readable as when you mtl novels. That’s not ignorable errors. It’s a complete failure of what you’re trying to do. I won’t read that at all.

 

I'm personally not super bothered by minor grammar issues, like minor tense errors or cases when an article or proposition is accidentally omitted, since some of these web authors churn out text at a ridiculously fast pace and a few mistakes are to be expected.

What does bother me though is sentence structure and run-on sentences. One reason I originally dismissed RR as a source for fiction is that the first few I randomly found had terrible sentence structure. Like seriously, they would keep stretching a sentence unnecessarily with commas when they really should've used a period. (At least give me a semicolon, ffs) Admittedly, now that I've given RR a second chance I've found that some writers do get better with time, so one good way to check is to sample a recent chapter to see if their writing is less crinhey.

tl;dr: Yeah, OP has a pretty good point and I agree. Just wanted to rant

 

Oh dear, I wonder if my prose is too purple? XD But when the passage is something like this...

It's too beautiful to not be purple! I used to 'dumb down' my writing, so to speak, in terms of simpler sentence structure and much plainer diction. But after a while, all it seemed to do was to be killing my voice and just making everything bland and uninspiring to read.

 

I generally don't care much about typos and misspellings as long as I can tell what it is really meant to be.
It is another matter if it is bad enough to affect the meaning of a sentence or scene and cause a plot hole, but in those cases the story often have other problems aside for misspellings.

 

Having a slight grammar issue isn't a problem, but too many grammatical issues can be annoying. As for writing style, hate to say this but I prefer one that is a simplistic form. Someone told me before, write down the word that came to your mind, instead of trying to be smart with complicated and professional words. At the end readers only need to read and understand whats written without any misfits.

 

Mine depends on how long the work is. If it's short and i can totally see where it is wrong, then i'll try to politely correct it. But, if it is long, as long as the errors wont affect the whole picture, then it is ok. Those errors that can lead to a different meaning though, i always "try" to correct.

I agree with the simplistic form too. Those with complicated words make me sleepy. It's ok for those things that really require technicalities though.

 

True. But that type of people will create problems even if there are none.

There are plenty of people who do their very best to attack stories arbitrarily. Many times they don't even mention specific passages, if there even are any, and in general refuse to qualify their arguments or provide any form of constructive feedback.

 

This is similar to how I see people saying that the the biggest problem in writing is plot holes when the reality is that plot holes are relatively minor problems. In comparison, a work rife with grammatical errors can be hard to parse, and works that are hard to parse are a lot harder to enjoy.

I think that the real problem is that readers usually aren't well educated enough about writing and the writing process to properly articulate what their criticisms actually are. And so they latch on terms that they see tossed around but may not represent how they feel about a work. The same goes for how people try to center their critiques of books on whether they have Mary Sues or other tropes when these stories always have more serious problems. It's natural to not know these tools for writing, but it can make it very tiring to discuss writing with people who like this.

 

I get bothered when someone translate a korean/Chinese/japanese ver. Of the names of some places/people wrong in English like there are maps and google people! Just look it up if you are not sure.

 

I usually try to describe what I find problematic and let them ask me if they want me to go in depth with a chapter. Then again, I have a pretty healthy amount of experience with editing.

 

Having descriptive prose isn't the biggest problem. It's more when authors get repetitive with their description. Or when they describe things that could be very easily inferred from the context. That's when it really starts to annoy me. I don't need the author to spend three sentences on how black an object is.

What you have as an example there has a couple sentences that I'm not the biggest fan of, but it's not too bad at all. Though I'm a fan of concise prose ala LeGuin, so there is that.