Nostr Web Client

Spending a few hours tonight going through my fiction writing and seeming where I can change passive voice to active voice, like removing was/were wherever possible. A bunch of tiny little sentence tweaks to tighten up the prose.

One of my early run-throughs was to search for "ly" and see what percentage of adverbs I could eliminate by using stronger or more precise verbs. And now this run through is meant to increase the ratio of active voice.

As a benchmark comparison, Brandon Sanderson used the word "was" as about 1.2% of his words or less in the Mistborn trilogy, whereas I found it to be 1.5% of my fiction writing.

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Discussion

c68e2176... 9mo ago

i feel like chatgpt could do this quickly

Lyn Alden 9mo ago

It could, but I want each sentence to be written as best as I can.

ChatGPT writing is often pretty visible in my experience. Not a huge fan.

Rusty Russell 9mo ago

I used chatgpt to revise a speech, asking it to increase emotional impact. The result was anodyne: there was only one phrase I liked, the rest was, basically, a series of the most predictable next words.

It creates good filler. But that's rarely what I need.

Quackman 9mo ago

However, he used “apprehensive” in every other sentence in the first mistborn book 🫠

Lyn Alden 9mo ago

Yeah his Mistborn series is considered to have somewhat weak prose for an author of his caliber. Unlike say Rothfuss or Jensen.

Quackman 9mo ago

True. Adjectives aside, I really enjoyed the books though.

Keith Meola 9mo ago

I've been focusing on this as well with the articles I write on my website. I use the passive voice way too much when writing so it's been eye-opening to see my WP plugin point it all out to me.

Hoshi 9mo ago

have your experiences in writing fiction changed how you write non-fiction?

Bewlay 9mo ago

I think this “show don’t tell” and “don’t use the passive tense” is a bit of a modern fashion. People have “told” stories for millennia. Wouldn’t surprise me if a few years if editors started saying “starting using the passive tense more to add more texture to your prose”

Lyn Alden 9mo ago

The way I see it, I want to be intentional with each decision. There are some sentences that I think are better in passive, to give more texture to the prose. Especially if they're next to an actively phrased sentence.

But I don't want to overuse words unintentionally.

Bewlay 9mo ago

Agree 💯

JG 9mo ago

I don't know if you suffer from this problem with your engineering background, but I find for me, having written scientific journal articles, the general norm is to use passive voice - therefore I find myself using it more than I should.

OrangeDawn 9mo ago

To meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania, the Party created Newspeak, which is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking.

Sparrow 9mo ago

Orwell’s words precisely

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

Piko 9mo ago

Do you use any LLM’s to help?

hasky 9mo ago

When I try to write using voice , most of the time many typos, I guess my English accent is different for Siri to recognized it 😁

lindeymagee 9mo ago

I actually loved that challenge in college, writing papers. No be verbs!

I don’t think of it much these days, but am thankful for the reminder.