I complain about the use of language in many of the books I review
here. I don't think I'm just being pedantic.
This was partly inspired by a friend's comments on a blog post
about RPG writing style which among other things encouraged people to
use "each" rather than "all" or "every". But going by my grammatical
education, they mean slightly different things (and in general any
English word has a shade of meaning even if it's not one that gets
written down):
- "Every guard has an axe", "each guard has an axe": there are N axes
for the N guards.
- "All the guards have an axe": there is one axe that they all share.
- "All the guards have axes": any given guard has at least one axe.
Similarly:
- "When the guard wakes up, he rings the bell": this is a regular
procedure which happens every time.
- "When the guard wakes up, he will ring the bell": it will happen
specifically on this one occasion; we say nothing here about how
usual it is.
Of course much of the time the meaning is obvious, but sometimes it
won't be, and sometimes the non-obviousness won't be apparent to the
author, because they don't have the same experiences as every reader.
(I think it was Samuel R. Delaney who pointed out that SF was the only
genre in which "her world exploded" or "he turned on his left side"
might have more than one possible meaning.)
My job as a writer is first to make it as clear as possible to the
reader what I meant. If they pause in mid-paragraph to think "hang on,
what does he mean?" then I have failed, whether my writing was
"correct" or not.
And so what I argue for is not some arbitrary written standard English
(insofar as I was taught English grammar at all it was treated as a
debased form of Latin, which was obviously the perfect linguistic
model for English to follow) but clarity. My idiolect (which is what
I would call "correct English" if I didn't know any better) is not the
best way to write for a large audience: the best way is the way that
they will understand most readily.
I've been thinking about this in particular because of recent game
rulebook writing and editing, for Roger's
Rules and other places. This is
technical writing: its sole job is to convey information as readily
as possible, so I think I can be excused fairly dull prose there.
(Also because the format is quite a short one.) I'm not trying to give
the reader a sense of joy at my well-turned sentences; ideally I want
my prose style not to be noticed at all. (Though after a bit I find
that I notice my own quirks, like a tendency to have sentences
consisting of two major clauses.)
An adventure or rulebook for an RPG slides slightly further into
entertainment: on the one hand the GM needs to be able to grasp what
is going on, whether that's the overall situation or a particular
encounter, well enough to build a mental structure that will then be
subject to the players' attempts to do something about it. But on the
other hand there's rather more to it than there is to a board game
rulebook, and it should be pleasant to read as well; slogging through
a series of descriptive paragraphs can be dreary work. (Software
documentation beyond the trivial falls into this category for me too.)
Actual prose fiction should be enjoyable to read too. Even here, the
mid-paragraph halt to work out what the author thought they meant by
that series of words kills off any momentum or immersion I have built
up: I am forcibly reminded that I am just reading words on a page, not
experiencing a story. For the sort of fiction I prefer, that can be
fatal to a sense of enjoyment.