So a while back, on a bus ride to/from home, I wrote down a terrible piece of writing (linked)
Let’s dive into why it was so bad.
- It wastes the reader’s time.
Multiple times in the piece, the same information is conveyed with no additional nuance, context, or subtext.
Repetition to emphasise a point is one thing, but doing it for no benefit is another.
- It assumes the reader is dumb.
There’s one especially guilty quote from the piece.
Bob had seen faces before.
Because humans are such good pattern-finding machines (as compared with actual computing machines), many explicit descriptions can be inferred from astoundingly little text.
Tom Scott has a great video on “the hidden rules of conversation”, and one of the ponts he makes is the ‘Maxim of Quantity’ - Give as much information as required, and nothing more.
“Alice” & “Bob” are both common english names, and as such, we expect them to be normal english speaking humans, conversing on Earth, without any prompting. Any text that affirms that convention is unneccessary.
I would call this technique of bad writing ‘exposing the subtext’, but don’t think it is universally bad. It could be useful in more complicated, longer works, if the reader is not expected to keep track of multiple (possibly changing & conflicting) POVs.
- It tells us one thing, but shows the opposite.
She thought about it for an moment, and then shouted at Bob. Angrily. Very angrily. She said “Because my feelings are telling me to say this.”
Adverbs in general are bad because they tell instead of show, and ‘very’ is possibly the least desciptive adverb in the English language.
‘Angrily’ is the telling word here, but the pause before the actual shouting is showing us that Alice is not - anger is not an emotion that causes you to think further before acting.
Furthermore, her dialogue is not written in an angry tone. Good dialogue should convey the tone by itself, but in this case the anger only comes from “shouted” - another telling word. The tone itself is neutral - and therefore calm.
Feel free to discuss &/or tear it to pieces.