Discussion Storywriter problems with language, I found out about something that made me doubt my story.

Hi there, welcome and thank you for coming to my post, allow me to introduce my self.

I'm "HentMas" an avid consumer of Japanese stories that in the last two years haves devoured a sizeable amount of light novels and web novels from the tree mayor Asian countries in this site (Japan, Korea, China)

Well, Considering this premise, and if you check my reviews, you'll know that I also write for fun, never being published (won a poem contest in my teen years but that's as close as I've gotten to being published), and outside of relatives and close friends, no one has read my stories.

I'm not a native English speaker, so I've mostly written in Spanish (How many Mexicans do you need to change a light bulb???, Just Juan!).

Well, anyway, since I've being harsh on some of my reviews and I've even complained about other reviewers for lacking knowledge and just posting biased opinions disregarding technique, I kept thinking to my self, "well, I should probably put my money where my mouth is" and began writing a dumb Isekai multiverse story that uses all the tools of story writing properly (set up for the plot device, pay off, characterizations, show don't tell, unintended consequences, take everything to the ultimate consequence, Deus Ex Machina etc... etc... etc.) I got the overview done in a day and spent the next 3 days writing 5 chapters.

I am more or less happy with what I've written, and decided to check the word count and got into worcounter dot net to see that my chapters are around the 700 - 1000 mark, which is fine enough for web novels.

But I also got a grade on something that I have never considered before, well, at least in Spanish, I got a score for "Reading level" it said "College Graduate".

I made a ∑(O_O; ) face and opened the little question mark next to the grading.

Apparently, the language I use is too advanced, which would make it unapproachable for a lot of people... but I read again and again and again my story and can't for the life of me, see a way to (for a lack of a better term) "dumb it down".

So... I'm conflicted for two reasons

First, In Spanish, we have a very wide range of words that can be used in different context with surprising amount of inflections to mean a variety of things, and according to what is being said and from whom it comes it can mean something different, this makes the choice of words important, but not as much as the CONTEXT, inflection and culture of the person writing it, let me give you an example "Tengo frijol en las patrullas" this literally translates to "I have beans in the patrol cars" which doesn't make any sense, but if you ask ANY MEXICAN what it means (not sure about other Spanish speaking countries), they might take a second but they will reach to the conclusion that it is a whimsical way of saying "my feet feel cold", which as it is butchering the language and a completely erroneous way of speaking, is also sometimes frowned upon by more educated people (I personally love Spanish because of this occurrences), it's considered an "Albur", a play of words that mean something completely different to what is being said (didn't find a direct translation to English for albur, sorry).

Why is this important? because I don't have that knowledge or context to recreate it in English, I've never lived in any English speaking countries, so the only way of speaking in English that I know of is the way I'm using right now, I may be less stiff while speaking, but I know I sound... like a pompous ass when writing (people have pointed it out to me).

Regarding this point, I want to ask you, if you've written a story, or just generally when you read a story, what do you do when you find something you don't understand?, how much do you consider what you're saying to be understood as you write?

I personally grew up reading a whole bunch of different things, from comic books to the encyclopedia, and whenever I found a word or an expression I didn't understand I looked it up in my school dictionary (not translation dictionary, the Spanish dictionary I had to bring to school), and when I saw that metric, and from my previous conversations in the internet, something clicked on me that made me doubt if I was using the language correctly, but... I don't think it should be that much of a problem, the difficulty to understand something should be overcome by the reader right? I mean, It's still a dumb Isekai story, but the language I used was particular to express exactly what I wanted to express, which is part of the whole story I'm trying to write, because for me the use of prose should be as important as the story in itself to make it enjoyable and beautiful, I didn't try to use other idioms or phrasings because then it wouldn't mean exactly what I wanted it to mean or conveyed the feeling that I wanted to convey, or it would get bogged down by explanations turning onto some sort of exposition dump just to explain what I wanted it to mean (I think you've seen this on other stories, I've seen it) or worse, I wouldn't do the characterizations properly and the tone would shatter...

This shouldn't be bothering to me... right???.

So I disregarded it for the time being, until yesterday.

I was reading a translation of another story I had being following, and in the translation notes, I noticed the translator saying things like "I didn't know what areolae meant before this, lol" or when the translation said a metaphor, the translator noted something along the lines of "I don't know what the author means with this so here it is, directly translated"

This made me second guess what I had written immensely and I began having doubts if I should even release it...

Secondly, considering the language, in Spanish, as a writer, you're encouraged to use the language to it's maximum potential to enhance the experience, a good work is considered to hold a variety of metaphors and similes that convey different feelings, let me give you an example.

"As she tried to wake up her brother, the blanket rose and engulfed the brown haired head in the pillow, the blanket creature grumbled with annoyance..."

This doesn't mean there is a literal creature made of blankets, it means there was someone that wrapped himself in the blankets that didn't want to wake up, this metaphor in Spanish would be considered amusing and would paint a pretty picture for the reader... I used that example on my story (with a bit more context of course, but it's got the same feeling and tone from what I tried to achieve).

But after being conscious about the reading level, I began to notice that most translated works on this site, don't do that, they don't have metaphors and stick to trying to convey in simple words the meaning and feel that the original author tried to achieve, I know it's not a fair comparison (language barrier, culture barrier...) but being self conscious I started to think about what people say regarding "think about your audience"

In Spanish, when you say "think about your audience" it doesn't mean to use specific language, it means to be mindful of the story you're telling, what would be of interest, what would be appropriate, what would the person reading your story like to know about, what is the focus, politics?, adventure?, romance?, what category does your work fall into and what plot devices you should be using.

But I've gotten to the conclusion that in English "think about your audience" also has come to mean "use language the person reading it can understand".

I'm not saying I don't do that in Spanish, I avoid words that are way above what the story is about, but I can manage unconsciously when writing because it's just a feel that I have, it's how I grew up and what I encounter on my every day life (a teen wouldn't use "undoubtable" for example) , but if I need to use a specific word to give a specific meaning and context I use it, because I know that with the phrasing the meaning can be conveyed even if the word is not properly understood, remember the "my feet feel cold" example? that's something even children can understand... even the whole "blanket creature" tidbit I don't think it's hard to understand... but now I'm second guessing my self because of the score in my writing.

How hard do you find to understand metaphors or wording in the works you enjoy?, if you don't understand something, do you seek out the meaning "within" the work? or do you look up the definition?

This interests me, because I love language, and I wanted to hear others opinions regarding this, oh! the story I'm writing isn't ready of course so I won't be posting more of that I just wanted to hear about your opinions regarding prose and wording and metaphors and stuff specific to the English language, I won't be changing my way of writing (it's my voice after all).

penny for your thoughts?.

 

Generally, any fluent speaker/reader of a language should be able to infer the meaning of a metaphor or word unless there is limited context or multiple reading difficulties at the same time. In your "blanket creature" example, it's pretty easy for anyone to infer given the context of the sentence. However, if you instead called the blanket an eiderdown, all of a sudden half the people reading are gonna miss the meaning of the metaphor because they need to understand both the unknown word and the metahpor.

I support the idea of writing your style. Gee, Tolkien wrote in borderline unreadable prose but Lord of the Rings is still praised as God-Tier work to this day. You can trust that most people will be able to catch your meaning 95% of the time, and the rest of the time they may look up the meaning of some word or metaphor. It's really not an issue unless there are so many confusions piled up that the overall meaning gets lost. Even if the target audience has limited reading capabilities, a few new words or phrases on every page isn't a big deal, especially with human inference capabilities.

I've got a few good examples from recently. I've read a few cultivation novels. You can bet your ass 5 months ago I had no idea what "Crouching Tigers, Hidden Dragons" or "jade fingers" meant, but after it was mentioned 2-3 times I figured it out from the context. Similarly, in Legendary Mechanic, they really love using the word "alighted" for getting off a vehicle. No way in hell did I used to know what that meant.

If you are really concerned about the target audience being confused, just cut down on the frequency of your metaphors or advanced vocabulary. But if they are already spread out, I'm sure it's fine to leave as is

 

Do you know why languages are sometimes hard to translate to other? the reason, is because of idioms, puns, slangs, dialects.
But sometimes it's true even if you know the same language you will not understand some of them because people in different part of regions use different dialects/slangs/puns/idioms. wich is the issue you are pointing.
But i vote for your writing style, often i read same tropes of novels just to spot different writing styles.

 

Oooh ho-Ho you nailed it in the head, I've also found cultivation novels that seemed so bizarre that I just had to read the chapter again to catch the meaning, I'm definitely not doing something like that, I think I know enough English to avoid it, there is another thing I want to note, the story I'm writing is specifically to be read in English, I wouldn't write as I'm writing in Spanish because it doesn't carry the same feel, hell, I translated as best as I could the first chapter to show my kid and I didn't like the tone, I realized that if I wanted to translate this works I would have to change a lot of things to convey the feel I'm aiming at, so yeah, it's a conscious effort to give it a good tone in English specifically.

 

You do you. (Another weird phrase when you stop and think about it.) As a reader I would prefer to read your preferred words than some attempt to ‘fix’ it. Every author has their own style of writing, and that is part of the charm of reading. Personally I enjoy metaphors and a more ‘lyrical’ writing style.

If you aim your novel at the lowest reading level you may as well make it a kid’s book from the start. Adults are expected to know how to look up what they don’t know.

In the past when I started reading web novels I was occasionally horrified at some of the translator’s comments. Not because they were bad translations, but because the translator felt the need to explain something I though was really obvious. It forced me to confront the fact that things one person thinks are obvious may be extremely confusing to another person. You will never be able to achieve a perfect understanding level for all readers. So what you need to do instead is make sure you understand it and are happy with it. Add a comments section to your novel, and if you get lots of comments asking about a particular wording, only then do you need to think about potentially changing it.

 

Speaking from the perspective of an American college student who was in the advanced English track through high school, I think many people just aren't really taught how to write in a more complex(??) style that involves use of higher level language, sentence structures, etc. I was taught mostly how to organize my thoughts in a logical manner (to make an argument) and to do it fast. A lot of emphasis was on how my overall argument was structured with much less emphasis on sentence structure, word choice, or repetition of those structures/word choices. We did very few creative writing exercises, which is where we could have gotten a chance to practice reading or writing analogies and doing more interesting things with the actual language.

For the level of English in the translations on this site, I think it's important to be cognizant of what kind of people are translating. In my experience, I've found that many are students and younger adults, and I think most of the audience is also in a similar range. For most of us, I would guess that colloquial, straightforward language is our first instinct when writing anyways. For myself, it's certainly easier to read. (I said I was in the advanced English track, but guess how much I suck at processing any literature pre-1970s?) When I read more published novels, a lot of the big novels (think ones that got turned into movies--Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, The Hunger Games, etc.) for young adults were also written in colloquial language.

Ngl, I think "college student level" reading might not be as shocking as you think from the name. There's actually a "college student" reading level in America that you can get in third grade. It's really not uncommon to attain that level. But are you seriously ready to be reading college materials by third grade? Absolutely not lmfao. I can tell you so little about the hundreds of pages of readings I had for my history class, half because I skimmed them all and half because I wasn't actually processing them. There are some college students (even at competitive universities) who have incredibly questionable writing skills. I don't meant to say your English is bad or anything, especially because it's clearly excellent, but like... I just want to put it out there that there are some pretty low standards for college students.

As far as the bit about translators, I think when they're being literal I think it's moreso saying something about either their skill in the source language or their capability to actually translate something well (to words that mean something to the audience). Along similar lines, translators have different values--are they interested in preserving the author's meaning as much as possible, even if it means being extremely literal? Or are they concerned about communicating the author's intent and giving the readers the same feeling they would expect to have if they were reading the source text? I read a super interesting thread about fan translators vs official translators and how their translations were a reflection of those values. Sometimes there are things that I find a bit too literal, but another reader might think differently.

I actually think it's rare to have figurative language that a reader is totally confused by. Instead, for me, what makes it more confusing is actually sentence structures that are unusual to what I'm usually consuming (colloquial language) or words that I completely don't recognize and can't even guess the meaning of. (As an example... I'd find it pretty weird to see "He postulated" as a dialogue tag.) In fact, now that I'm thinking of it, longer sentences typically make me think that of higher-level language (most certainly not always true)... Anyways, if your writing is similar to what you have in your first post in terms of diction, you're fine but a little bit more flowery than I suppose I would typically expect to see online. As far as figurative language goes, it's probably not something you need to worry about? And even if you do write in a more complex way, there's always people who will read it, it just might be a different audience.

I typed a lot and went nowhere lmao. Super interesting discussion though, glad you started it!

 

Not at all! you got to a few things I hadn't considered, because as you say and how I understand you, "College English" isn't about creative writing, but in Spanish, what I would consider "College level" would be specific to creative writing, I wasn't considering that distinction because in Spanish the language classes focus extremely on the "artistic value" of a work, reading and comprehension teaches us from primary school to "understand" the meaning based on context, by high school you can read anything and everything and even if it uses advanced vocabulary most people will understand it, I feel that's because of the language always focusing more on the context and inflection than the actual word being used.

By artistic it's not just "tell a story" but "tell a *beautiful* story" what matters is the beauty of the actual prose, not so much the plot or things like that.

And regarding translations, I read a Chinese love story where it was obvious that the translator had flourished the prose and personally I found that better, because that small amount of extra effort was enough to make the story stand out from the others I had read.

 

@HentMas, I think you've misunderstood something quite critically important. These 'reading level' reports are not based on how advanced your writing or your prose is, but how readable it is, and higher often is not better. One of the most popular free tools out there, for example, is the Gunning Fog Index, which ranks readability from 1 to 17, with 17 requiring a college education to read and understand with ease at a glance. Anything above 17 is essentially considered 'unreadable' or requiring multiple reads to fully understand.

Now, one of the bigger factors in calculating 'readability' is in sentence structure. If we look at your post, most of your 'paragraphs' are in reality just entire massive run-on sentences. This is generally considered very poor form in writing, and readability tests will penalize you heavily for it in scoring. Let's look at a paragraph of yours from this thread:

This is an example of one of your 'better' paragraphs, because at least you split it into two sentences. The GFI index rates this as a 19. Other paragraphs in your posts were ranked over 50. If your forum posts are even remotely reflective of your novel writing, then this is the main reason why your readability score is ranked the way it is. It isn't about individual words, prose, or things like that; it is that you are not using 'proper' sentence structure. You don't have to 'dumb it down', you have to learn to write better.

By comparison, the above paragraph I wrote was calculated as an 8, which according to the GFI means that an 8th grader would be able to understand it with ease.

Now, the GFI isn't a perfect tool, so as with all tools use it with a grain of salt, but it can be a good way for you to remind yourself to check the readability and flow of your writing. Don't worry too much about things like prose and metaphor; focus on sentence structuring and flow!

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Just to provide even more help, let me provide what I would consider to be a very lightly edited version of the paragraph I quoted:

I personally grew up reading a whole bunch of different things, from comic books to the encyclopedia. Whenever I found a word or an expression I didn't understand, I looked it up in my school dictionary (not the translation dictionary, the Spanish dictionary I had to bring to school). After I saw that metric, and factoring in previous online conversations, something clicked on me. I started to doubt if I was using the language correctly, but... I don't think it should be that much of a problem, because the difficulty to understand something should be overcome by the reader, right? I mean, it's still just a dumb Isekai story. The language I used was chosen to express exactly what I wanted to express, which is part of the whole story I'm trying to write. For me, the use of prose should be as important as the story itself in making it enjoyable and beautiful.

I didn't try to use other idioms or phrasings, because then it wouldn't mean exactly what I wanted it to mean or convey the feeling that I wanted to convey. It could also bog the prose down in explanations, turning it into some sort of exposition dump just to explain what I wanted it to mean. I think you've seen this in other stories, because I certainly have. Or worse, it might result in me not doing the characterizations properly and shattering the tone.

The changes, as you can see, were extremely minor and cosmetic, but almost immediately the readability score dropped down to a 12; ie, something a high school senior could understand. Simple usage of proper syntax breaks took this paragraph from off-the-charts unreadable (according to the GFI standard) to easily readable for almost everyone.

I hope all of this is helpful for you in improving your writing, and wish you the best of luck!

 

Oh, I greatly appreciate the context, but how I write my story haves nothing to do with how I write a post in a forum (different mediums, different focus) on a forum I mostly attempt to put my thoughts across as If I was having a conversation with someone, that's why sometimes I use running sentences and don't break the paragraph accordingly (or even clarify things within brackets that aren't entirely unrelated but don't really make sense on their own), I'm just writing as I "think", which is NOT how I write for a story.

I just checked the index with the tool you provided by checking the entirety of what I have written, I got a score of 8.612, WAAAAY bellow what you just said is considered unreadable.

So, with what you just said, wordcounter dot net would be... wrong, since the index is around an 8th grader level.

This has diminished my worries greatly, I appreciate this so much!!!

 

Yup! All of the tools use different metrics and things like that, so cross-check with a couple and if most seem fine, don't worry about it too much!

EDIT: Taking another look, Word Counter uses the Dale-Chall readability formula, which focuses almost exclusively on the usage of 3000 words which 4th-graders all understand. I suspect it is one of the more rarely used ones, as I haven't even heard of it before.

You can also try the Flesch-Kincaid test, which is by far the best-known test!

 

Yeap, just checked it, it says it should be fine for 13-14 years old which is probably the range for this Isekai stories, I'm really thankful for the tools provided, it helps a lot to dispel that nasty feeling that I was doing something wrong because I'm not a native English speaker.

 

Perfect! So right around the Harry Potter range, actually. I think you should probably be fine, based on all of the above factors! Just one outlier test that 'penalized' you for a few reasons that aren't necessarily applicable or relevant.