/post/69259474950/writing-away-madly-he-made-this-fatal-little -- Is this actually frowned upon? Never, in the course of professionally writing, have I ever had an editor mark this as something worth changing, and I've never seen another style editor/writer/blogger/advice-giver discuss it, either. How credible is the source, and do you think it's as wrong as they posit?
The trick is that it’s splitting tenses and using the passive tense far too much. Try this: Waiting impatiently, he waited for her to come. That doesn’t make any sense, but since the sentence is stating two different things, it’s harder to catch.
(Googling it, I can’t seem to find it anywhere? I had this criticism written all over my work in college. .-.)
As the article points out, it’s not technically wrong, but it does catch at the reader and slow them down, rather than letting the sentence flow more smoothly. Read their comparing sentences again:
Checking to see if anyone was watching, he took a seat next to her.
He sat next to her after checking to make sure nobody would see.
Admiring herself in the mirror, she smiled as the telephone rang.
She was smiling at what she saw in the mirror when the telephone suddenly rang.
See how the second sentence examples flow better? Your eyes don’t pause at the comma, which slows down the action you’re trying to convey, rather than making it smooth. (These sentences aren’t perfection, of course, but they do a decent example.) Look at the following example:
Sitting up in alarm, Beth pulled the covers under her chin and screamed.
She screamed. Loud and piercing, the sound muffled by the blanket she’d pressed to her face.
Even though the second sentence does have commas (even a period!), it gives us a lot more detail, allowing the reader to be more placed in the story rather than passively observing. The idea isn’t about it being grammatically wrong, but that there are better ways to structure the sentence, and that in turn will make your story better.
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