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.
- Posted by DrBob at
09:22am on
07 February 2026
Oh hell, yes. Hey RPG writers! If 2 or more GMs have interpreted your rules paragraph in different ways, your writing WAS NOT CLEAR.
I like Dave Langford's Thoggisms for highlighting sentences which are inadvertently hilarious because of lack of care in the writing.
As well as agreeing with you, I get miffed by folks who use pointless made up words like 'learnings' when we have perfectly good originals like 'lessons' and 'conclusions' and 'take home messages'. And people who use 'reign' when they mean 'rein'. Horse riding metaphor! Nothing to do with monarchy!
- Posted by RogerBW at
09:29pm on
07 February 2026
Particularly when someone is given "free reign".
I've recently been playing Amazing Adventures with Whartson Hall, and given that the system is a close descendant of Basic D&D I was never likely to love it… but there are so many omissions and ambiguities that as a player I feel as though I'm constructing a game out of a collection of pieces that mostly fit together, filling in a lot of the gaps myself. But someone else might build quite a different game from those same pieces. So what am I paying for again? (Well, I didn't buy it, I'm not GMing. But still.)
- Posted by Chris at
12:30pm on
10 February 2026
I'm sure it is called pedantry, because every time I mention that someone has used the wrong word completely, or said what used to be called a malapropism, I am called a pedant (or else told it's perfectly good dialect, only they can never tell me where it is dialect from).
Even with that epithet hanging over my head I often wonder what the unfortunate word "of" has done wrong to deserve the arbitrary use it gets: "in the door" and "off of the table" grate on me every time. The spelling "great" where "grate" is intended is just ignorance at present and until the ignorant have made it the norm and it becomes dictionary-English, but unless what is being spoken of is a peep-hole or a keyhole, what exactly is in the door?
Then there is story for the floor of a house, with stories as the plural, instead of storey and storeys.
The loss of "disinterested" as meaning "having no vested interest in, neutral" and its use to replace uninterested – there was a perfectly good word doing the job already, so why get rid of it and lose another at the same time? Likewise the loss of "partially" as meaning "being biased in favour of" and its use to replace "partly": again, there was a perfectly good word already, and the original word is shorter; why add two syllables and use a word that's less suited to the job? Precipitous where precipitate is intended has now become dictionary-English, or at least dictionary-American, but when in the 1980s I first met it in use to describe a hasty marriage I had a vision of the couple saying their vows while abseiling down a mountain. Mind you, the same book gave me "his clothes bespoke a gentleman": I built a short story in my head about a discontented pair of trousers whose owner was quite the wrong size, and which were reduced to wandering into a tailor's shop and asking him for a nice quiet chap, thirty-four inside leg, dresses to the right....
- Posted by ashley pollard at
04:35pm on
10 February 2026
"I complain about the use of language in many of the books I review here. I don't think I'm just being pedantic."
Sometime you are, but sometimes it's a necessary you are.
English is the language of mugging other languages for words and grammar. So any rules are more like guidelines.