Lite Review

From a very young age we as Americans taught writing skills. From the basic introduction to the alphabet to a college level course on the subject, there is no way to avoid it. Starting as early as elementary school students are expected to write papers and reports in a professional as well as a creative manner. This could be as simple as “What did you do this past summer?” to as complicated as “Explain the motivations for early British movement to America” and far beyond these simple examples. If a student is studying writing itself or even engineering or history, he will still be expected to write in an academic and professional fashion. With such a stress on writing throughout the sixteen or more years of education, one would think that a person would come out a professional on the rules of grammar, mechanics and style. Well that same person would be mistaken. Even people who write and publish books can make simple, easily avoidable errors in the basic rules of writing. Just look at the craze of writing a personal memoir, everyone and his brother seem to be doing this lately and only a small minority of them is actually a writer. The books get published because people are interested in hearing the story and not because of any literary merit. Because of this, simple style mistakes can make it onto bookstore shelves. This is a sad occurrence given the amount of background that educated people supposedly have in the area of writing. Discussed here are many of the common mistakes that people make when creating a story or a piece of professional literature?

The first is one that any creative writer is very familiar with but many non-storytellers may not even remember. Passive voice is by far the most common error made in any kind of writing. Passive voice is the inversion of subject and verb such as the following example: The sandwich was eaten. Who ate the sandwich? Seemingly no one at all, it was simply eaten. While grammatically correct, this is a weak and ambiguous way to refer to the act of the sandwich being eaten. It should read: Bob ate the sandwich. Now we know who is doing the action and to what is he doing it. When deconstructing a sentence one gets to the sentence at its simplest in order to understand it, the above example is as simple as it gets and in the passive voice writing example, there is no subject. Reading literature with this error will immediately call out the writer as an amateur.

Point of view is an integral part of any story due to the fact that it literally shapes how the story is viewed. Because of this, the POV needs to be clear and consistent. Is this story in third person omniscient or first person limited? If the reader is a few pages or chapters in and cannot answer this question then he will not be able to follow the story writing. If the first half of a narrative is focused on one character and gets into her head and suddenly there is an inexplicable change in that POV, it could confuse the reader to a point of losing interest in the story. There exist stories and books that change POV throughout the story, but to be successful such a thing is called out, as in “As I lay Dying” where the chapter title is the name of the speaker. Switching without such notification is confusing and will take away from the story as the reader has to work through a muddled POV.

Verb tense and person are often misused and inconsistent. There are the three basic writing verb tenses: Past, present and future. Three more tenses appear in person: first second and third. Most stories are written in third or first person and in past tense. First person would be the “I” telling the story and third would follow the characters from outside of their perspective. Past tense tells how everything happened in the past as if the narrator is telling the story having already experience it in its entirety. Present is when the action is happening now. The common mistake in tense is to change from one to the other throughout the story. One may be writing in past tense for most of the story and then switch a verb to present without noticing, or could change person without explanation. This is similar to the POV mistake. The author needs to pick one tense and stick to it, or call out the fact that it has been changed. For example, the story could be in present with flashbacks in past as long as it is clear what the author is doing.

Withholding a name of the main character can be a mistake. There are stories in which the main character does not have a name that are successful, but certain things must be taken into consideration when trying this tactic. If the character is unnamed for most of the story writing, he should remain that way. Keeping the name from the reader until the last page is contradictory, if he didn’t need a name in the first part of the story then that should stay true at the end of the narrative as well. Why should the reader need to know her name at all if most of the story was told without it? While this does not relate to the narrator of a memoir as the narrator is the writer of the story, it can still be applied to other supporting characters in such a book.

Many non-writers have taken the time to write their stories in the form of a memoir. While the gravity of some of these books is not questioned, the writing style of the book can make them near unreadable. Anyone without a strong writing background trying to write a memoir should take steps to watch for such common errors as have been discussed here and many more beyond these.