Plugging through my grammar and gremlin check. Will probably finish this weekend and be back to "writing" writing. Still tempted to hire a proofreader but that's another thousand bucks in red ink on a book that barely sold twenty copies. No, I really don't think a few misplaced commas are what is killing my sales.
Decided against a sensitivity reader. I haven't the heart for another round of revisions. May toss the Paris book to one, though. Do it before primary revisions and clean-up...
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Speaking of commas. So this series is told in First-Person Immersive. Meaning the narrative has the flavor of the character's natural speech. Not entirely; narrative is generally more structured and formal.
But here is a place it falls down; as speech, I am using punctuation for the sound. Just like writing words phonetically to capture an accent. One of the ways I have been showing Penny's motor-mouth approach is by leaving off commas, in particular, the comma between an introductory subordinate clause and the rest of the sentence.
Things like, "When I left the station there was a motorbike parked outside." The grammar books really want a comma to follow that "station." There is a good Strunkian reason for it; without the comma one might be tempted to lump "station" in with the following word or words; "When I left the (station there was) a motorbike parked outside." Which is confusing, and that is the supposed point here.
Thing is, the way it is spoken -- by this character, that is -- that implied pause isn't there. So I am caught between using punctuation for the sound and using punctuation for its primary task of clarifying structure and meaning.
For this edit pass, I'm putting most of those commas in. In almost all narrative but in somewhat less dialogue. I hope that will do.
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And last night I hit a "You didn't used to." Oh, boy. The commas above are, mostly, not an edge case. It is pretty clear when they are grammatically needed and when they are needed to clarify the sentence. "Use to" is another thing entirely.
Pages and pages everywhere, language forums, academic and publishing forums. Here's how I break down the various levels of argument:
The first is the simplistic Prescriptivist approach. I have sympathy for Prescriptivists; there are nuances of meaning that would be useful to preserve and some of them do seem worth fighting for. This is none of them; this is more of a reflexive hyper-correction that takes the simplest form of the rules for "use" and applies them. As such, the Prescriptivist guides are unclear and possibly contradictory as to whether it is "use" or "used" across varieties of construction; "I U to," "I never U to," "I didn't U to," "I U never to," etc.
A probably correct approach that is, unfortunately, not as useful in an editing context is to understand how spoken usage leads and the written recording of it sometimes struggles to follow. Because of that immediately-following "to," the typical pronunciation becomes "I didn't useta..."
It feels natural to separate at the "to" but leave that tongue stop there; "...didn't used to..."
And this approach still -- despite the Prescriptivists -- marks a slim majority of all citations in the wild, including professional publication by style-leaders; newspapers and the like.
But "habitual colloquialism" is not the permission slip you want to be waving under the nose of a hardened editor. Fortunately, there is analysis, analysis that uses terms my understanding of language is far too primitive to understand. So it can be understood if this phrase is not the grammar one might assume it is, but instead a rather different bit of speech.
And, actually, what it appears to be is an idiom. "Use" is one of those words that creeps into all sorts of corners and has far too many different roles. It is probably standing in here for some word or phrase that would be easier to understand, and has been given a specific declension because that is how it was habitually used in speech.
It still doesn't help that it gets marked as "colloquial, not for business use." Fortunately I only have it once in the book, and it is in dialogue by someone who hardly speaks Oxford English, so no problem there.
But it is the annoyance of editing. The computer flags something. I spend hours reading up and I discover that the only "authorities" who speak with assurance as to the underlying rule are those who are trying to sell their simplified (and too often, entirely incorrect) version of the rules so that they can sell their service of helping you use those rules.
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And now the computer has flagged '80s. Because the decade is the '80s -- a trailing apostrophe is incorrect for numbers, but a leading apostrophe is used to indicate the truncation of "1980s." Unless you are talking of 80's music...oops. Because now it is possessive...or is this one of those possessive cases (like the infamous "its") where the apostrophe is omitted?
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