Photo: Adam Smasher
Having a number of deadlines last week, I resorted to my emergency ploy of watching more television. As always, it was revelatory. This time I was struck by screenwriters’ never-ending resort to the ancient and lame “Look over there!” strategy to extricate heroes and villains from tight spots.
A diversion can be simple and improvised on the spot, as in Alias, when Jennifer Garner confuses the bad guy by causing her phone to ring a few yards from where she’s standing. Or it can involve meticulous planning, like the split-second assassination on a crowded sidewalk in the new movie The Double. In any case, such tactics remind me of how writers often end up doing the same kind of thing, no doubt without any planning at all: they distract their readers, pulling them out of the prose and sometimes even diverting them off the page.
Some common ploys:
- Referring to a person without introduction. If it’s Shakespeare, fine. If it’s someone obscure whom your readers know well, fine—you don’t want to patronize by explaining the obvious. But if you have any interest in bringing along the uninitiated, then include a first name and a short gloss, especially if the surname is a common one: Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins. You’ll save your readers a side trip to Wikipedia.
- Overusing “scare” quotes. Some writers love too much these little “noodges” and “eyewinks” that say “you and I know what I really mean.” The trouble is, not all readers will know what you’re getting at. They might rally themselves to look up the quoted terms elsewhere, or they might just tire of all the eyebrow wiggling and wonder whether you have anything definitive to say. Better to just say what you mean.
- Switching tenses midstream. This will guarantee that readers turn back to begin again. It happens frequently in academic prose when the historical present comes into play: “Obama says” versus “Obama said.” The present tense is helpful when paraphrasing or summarizing or suggesting that a person was or is in the habit of saying something: Heraclitus writes that we never step into the same river twice. Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel says SUVs cause more damage to roads than lighter vehicles do. The past tense more strongly implies that a person actually said something, verbatim, at a given time: Emanuel said, “That’s where the damage is caused—in heavier vehicles.” Heraclitus wrote, “Potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin, hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei.” Varying the treatment can work well enough, but flip-flopping within a paragraph or even a sentence is inelegant at best, misleading at worst, and distracting always.
- Adding too many hotlinks. Even if the main purpose of your text is self-promotional and your links are to your own works, the primary goal is for readers to reach the end of this work.
- Beginning a paragraph with He or She. If the referent is more than a sentence behind, readers will have to wait for it to catch up. (I could swear I notice this more in texts where the name under discussion is long or difficult to type. Tip: Instead of typing Wittgenstein every time you need to, just type Witt and then do a global replacement later.)
- Sending readers on a wild goose chase with commands to “see above” and “see below.” Confident writers trust readers to (a) remember what they’ve read and (b) wait for an argument to unfold. They know that tables of contents and indexes are available as guides to longer works.
If you need to create a cover for a passing hit man, these ruses probably won’t do it. But they might just shake a reader off your tail.
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A version of this post originally appeared at Lingua Franca, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, on November 13, 2011. More reader comments are available there.
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