BellaOnline Forums Career Fiction Writing Enter to win Far From the Madding Gerund

Below, I've posted a sentence with four grammatical or writing errors in it. The first person to correctly list at least TWO out of these four errors will win the prize.

This contest is open to anyone living in the US or UK who is aged 18 or older. Only posts that are unedited will be accepted as answers. Prize will be shipped to the winner at no cost to the winner. The prize will be a copy of the book Far From the Madding Gerund which lists at a value of $22.00.

For complete rules, please visit http://www.bellaonline.com/misc/sweeps/rules.asp

##

Remember to give at least TWO of the four errors in your answer.

CONTEST SENTENCE:

Rushing through the door, the rug slipped out from under him, and he laid there yelling at the carpenter that laughed as he past by.

Hi, Elle. Okay, I'll give it a try.

(1) That first phrase "Rushing through the door" is referring to the rug the way this sentence is set up, and not "he" who is supposed to be the subject of the sentence. (2)"he laid there" should be "he lay there". (3)"the carpenter that laughed" should be "the carpenter who laughed". (4) "as he past by" should be "as he passed by". and (5) probably not too good to end a sentence with a preposition.

Excellent Karm! Congratulations - you got all four correct and even found an extra one.

Email me your postal address and I'll get Lisa to send you the book. Well done.

Terrific! I'll do that right now.

Thanks for the book, Elle! You know the funny thing is that I've never had any formal training in grammar. I've just soaked up a feel for it over the years based on the immense amount of reading that I do. That's why I couldn't exactly explain the correct answers that I gave. But if I could sort out that grammar, then there is definitely hope for anyone!

I'm a bit the same. I know what sounds right and what sounds wrong to my ears. Over the past year or so I've started looking more into why something is wrong or poorly written, both grammatically and reading-wise. For my critiques, I always like to give a reason why I think something doesn't work as well as it should, and it always goes back to the effect it has on the reader.

Just for interest, the explanations of those errors above are:
1) A dangling participial phrase, which also causes ambiguity (ie, the rug is doing the rushing through the door)
2) "Laid" is a past tense objective verb, and there is no object in that phrase. The past tense subjective form is "lay", being the past tense of "lie".
3) "Who" for people, "that" for inanimate objects and animals (and I always add, if you don't want to offend someone, don't call their beloved pet a "that" either).
4) "Passed" is the past tense of "pass". "Past" refers to time.

Good explanation! These are the kind of technical terms I wish I knew rather than having to say, "Well, trust me on this, you want to write it this way -- though I can't explain why!"

Oh, you mentioned in my forum that you've written a crime novel? Is it available?? I'd love to feature it!

No unfortunately not. Long story short, 9/11 threw my plot out the window.

That happened to fantasy writer Tad Williams with his novel War of the Flowers. I won't go into what happens in case you want to read it for yourself, but a crucial development in his novel completely parallels 9/11 even though he wrote it a few years beforehand. He ended up publishing the book anyway with an explanation right in the beginning so readers wouldn't think he was trying to exploit 9/11. A very unusual situation.

I also knew someone who took forever to write a novel based on people she had met while visiting the USSR in the 1980s, and guess what happened? The collapse of the Soviet Union! Nobody was interested in her novel at that point, but she kept the material on hand and worked it into a memoir years later.

It must have been an incredibly frustrating experience for you with your crime novel, but it seems that no writing is ever really wasted, especially if you can rework it into something else for the future.

I do have an idea of how to rewrite it, although I'm not yet sure how much I want to change, since there is a great deal of it I'd love to keep if possible. But when I finished it I then got stuck into writing Fantasy which suits me far better as a genre than realistic crime does. So, although I mourn for all the work I did, sometimes I wonder if it's not a better deal that I didn't publish it and get roped into sticking with the crime genre (as can happen).