Line-by-line 1: Improving Prose
Finding fixes for passages that just don't work.
This is a new idea, so please let me know if you find it useful. In Line-by-line I’ll be dissecting passages I’ve come across (characters, places, and other sensitive information altered) to figure out why they don’t work and how they can be fixed.
This issue’s passage:
He would understand her pain. He would look at her with his stern gray eyes, stretch his thin, after their father, lips into a bitter smile, and spread his slender arms for her.
Before diving in: stop. Reread that sentence. What problems do you see? How would you fix them? Let me know in the comments!
The first issue here is pretty easy to spot, “after their father”. This subclause does not fit here for a few reasons:
It breaks the flow of the sentence, moving us from a description of what is happening to a seemingly irrelevant comparison to their father.
As a description, it is too far away from the noun it is modifying – a trait also found in dangling modifiers.
The intended meaning of the sentence is somewhat unclear and may confuse readers.
So, let’s remove that clause and the parenthetical commas either side.
He would understand her pain. He would look at her with his stern gray eyes, stretch his thin lips into a bitter smile, and spread his slender arms for her.
Better, right? The flow of the sentence is no longer broken and everything makes sense. You could leave it as this and most readers would read it without question.
But what if you do want the reader to know the information we’ve taken out? That the character got his thin lips from his father, how would we do this?
He would understand her pain. He would look at her with his stern gray eyes, stretch his thin, lips (a feature he’d got from their father) into a bitter smile, and spread his slender arms for her.
This… works. It’s fine, but do we need brackets? That’s personal preference. You could just as easily put the bracketed text in a footnote (hello, Pratchett!), or rephrase and punctuate in a different way.
He would understand her pain. He would look at her with his stern gray eyes, stretch his thin lips, which he’d got from their father, into a bitter smile, and spread his slender arms for her.
This is nicer, I think. It gets across all the information the author intended in the original passage in a smoother way. But… boy, there sure are a lot of commas there! Let’s try something else…
He would understand her pain. He would look at her with his stern gray eyes, stretch his thin lips – which he’d got from their father – into a bitter smile, and spread his slender arms for her.
En-dashes and em-dashes are popular in modern writing for a reason!
This is a much smarter looking passage than the one we started with, but we haven’t changed that much. To recap, we have:
Moved the bad clause across one word, bringing it closer to the noun it modifies
Rephrased “after their father” to “which he’d got from their father” or “a feature he’d got from their father”
Chosen the most fitting punctuation for the prose (which will be different for everybody!)
What has this achieved?
The original meaning of the passage has been retained
A reader is less likely to be confused by the passage
Given options to fit different prose styles
Removed the problem of a poor modifying clause
The difference? Two words, alternate punctuation, and a clause shifted one word across. Not bad!
You can take this approach in your own writing, too. When you find a sentence that doesn’t make sense, consider why, maybe list out the intention of the sentence. Now work on integrating that intention into the flow of your sentence.
Fixing every mistake you make is tough, especially when writing a 100,000 world epic, but that’s what an editor is for! Subscribe to my newsletter to receive tips, tricks, and workthroughs like this one, or contact me directly via email (cbpowell95@gmail.com).