Sentence Structure - Tumblr Posts

How to make your writing sound less stiff

Just a few suggestions. You shouldn’t have to compromise your writing style and voice with any of these, and some situations and scenes might demand some stiff or jerky writing to better convey emotion and immersion. I am not the first to come up with these, just circulating them again.

1. Vary sentence structure.

This is an example paragraph. You might see this generated from AI. I can’t help but read this in a robotic voice. It’s very flat and undynamic. No matter what the words are, it will be boring. It’s boring because you don’t think in stiff sentences. Comedians don’t tell jokes in stiff sentences. We don’t tell campfire stories in stiff sentences. These often lack flow between points, too.

So funnily enough, I had to sit through 87k words of a “romance” written just like this. It was stiff, janky, and very unpoetic. Which is fine, the author didn’t tell me it was erotica. It just felt like an old lady narrator, like Old Rose from Titanic telling the audience decades after the fact instead of living it right in the moment. It was in first person pov, too, which just made it worse. To be able to write something so explicit and yet so un-titillating was a talent. Like, beginner fanfic smut writers at least do it with enthusiasm.

2. Vary dialogue tag placement

You got three options, pre-, mid-, and post-tags.

Leader said, “this is a pre-dialogue tag.”

“This,” Lancer said, “is a mid-dialogue tag.”

“This is a post-dialogue tag,” Heart said.

Pre and Post have about the same effect but mid-tags do a lot of heavy lifting.

They help break up long paragraphs of dialogue that are jank to look at

They give you pauses for ~dramatic effect~

They prompt you to provide some other action, introspection, or scene descriptor with the tag. *don't forget that if you're continuing the sentence as if the tag wasn't there, not to capitalize the first word after the tag. Capitalize if the tag breaks up two complete sentences, not if it interrupts a single sentence.

It also looks better along the lefthand margin when you don’t start every paragraph with either the same character name, the same pronouns, or the same “ as it reads more natural and organic.

3. When the scene demands, get dynamic

General rule of thumb is that action scenes demand quick exchanges, short paragraphs, and very lean descriptors. Action scenes are where you put your juicy verbs to use and cut as many adverbs as you can. But regardless of if you’re in first person, second person, or third person limited, you can let the mood of the narrator bleed out into their narration.

Like, in horror, you can use a lot of onomatopoeia.

Drip Drip Drip

Or let the narration become jerky and unfocused and less strict in punctuation and maybe even a couple run-on sentences as your character struggles to think or catch their breath and is getting very overwhelmed.

You can toss out some grammar rules, too and get more poetic.

Warm breath tickles the back of her neck. It rattles, a quiet, soggy, rasp. She shivers. If she doesn’t look, it’s not there. If she doesn’t look, it’s not there. Sweat beads at her temple. Her heart thunders in her chest. Ba-bump-ba-bump-ba-bump-ba- It moves on, leaving a void of cold behind. She uncurls her fists, fingers achy and palms stinging from her nails. It’s gone.

4. Remember to balance dialogue, monologue, introspection, action, and descriptors.

The amount of times I have been faced with giant blocks of dialogue with zero tags, zero emotions, just speech on a page like they’re notecards to be read on a stage is higher than I expected. Don’t forget that though you may know exactly how your dialogue sounds in your head, your readers don’t. They need dialogue tags to pick up on things like tone, specifically for sarcasm and sincerity, whether a character is joking or hurt or happy.

If you’ve written a block of text (usually exposition or backstory stuff) that’s longer than 50 words, figure out a way to trim it. No matter what, break it up into multiple sections and fill in those breaks with important narrative that reflects the narrator’s feelings on what they’re saying and whoever they’re speaking to’s reaction to the words being said. Otherwise it’s meaningless.

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Hope this helps anyone struggling! Now get writing.

Dammit, my tricks explained!

some writer snob somewhere: Do not start sentences with But or And because doing so is grammatically incorrect.

me, writing my fic: But I don’t care. And you can’t stop me.

2024.04.14 Hour +2 🇰🇷 - Speech prompt

& Korean sentence structure

Speech prompt/English transcript:

When we finish planting, we will have a village feast. ~한댔다.

But, rice planting is in ten days. ~한단다.

I wish we could have a party first…

These days, my dad weeds every day. ~하신다.

I've tried it, and to my eyes it looks the same as rice. ~인다.

The weeding also hurts your back and wasn't even fun. ~다

So I just played in the water with my friends in the stream. ~다

Chanwoo's mother is Vietnamese, so he has a dark complexion. ~다

I think I'll turn jet-black after summer. ~다

A terrifying typhoon passed through our village. ~다

When the wind was violently raging, I was (so) scared that I couldn't even go out of the house . ~다

[Translating is hard and not helpful!! Move to questions!]

What happens when the rain stops? ~다

to create transcript: use Papago to get translation. (it allows you to skip the "translation" part of it even if you already understand what the sentence means.) For unique endings that are particularly well translated into English/I'm still learning them so I can't figure out a translation I'm satisfied with, I'll just add the Korean so that I know what ending to use and still build up some familiarity.

Basic Korean Sentence Structure:

source at the end.

subject + time + place + object + manner + verb 

subject (-은/는 vs. -이/가) + time (from the largest to smallest units) + place (-에서 vs. -에)+ object (-을/를)+ manner + verb 

some flexibility is possible, like:

time + subject + ....

omit the subject

omit the object particle (when the object is already clear)

All the components can move to any position in a sentence. However, this requires use of all particles. Particles clearly mark what is the subject or object in a sentence, so Koreans can tell what’s the subject or the object no matter what.

은/는 vs. 이/가:

The topic marker puts the emphasis on the verb while the subject marker places emphasis on the subject.

그는 고양이를 봅니다. →He sees a cat. (It emphasizes on the fact that he sees a cat.)

그가 고양이를 봅니다. → It’s him who sees a cat. (In this sentence, the emphasis would be on him, who sees the cat.)

my edit: 은/는: "out of all the actions a person could take, it's this action."

my edit: 이/가: "out of all people (or subjects), it is this person (subject) who does the action."

-에서 vs. -에

If it is where action is happening use -에서 (similar to "at/in")

If simply wanting to mark the location use -에 (similar to "to")