Tips – Writing Translations

What makes a good translation? As talented as my translator clients are, they still sometimes have questions about how they can improve.

So you’ve already read through your text to get a full understanding of its content and style. You’ve taken out your bi-lingual dictionary and style guide. Google is open on-screen, waiting to assist. And you’re ready to begin.

What can you keep in mind as you go about your translation task? Here are a few simple tips.

1. Read around the subject
If you’re lucky enough to have a regular client, you will develop an understanding of their main topics as you work with them. But when you are introduced to a new field it helps to read about the subject in books or online. This will help you to learn the terminology and understand your audience. Be sure to refer to reputable sources, and don’t assume their spelling or grammar is up to scratch – check for yourself.

2. Give yourself plenty of time
Your job is difficult enough without putting yourself under unnecessary time pressure. Sometimes it can’t be helped if you’re working to tight time constraints, but if you have the luxury of starting a few days earlier than your deadline, give yourself that flexibility. It will give you more time to read around the subject (point 1); to find that succinct, clearest word or phrase (points 4, 5 & 6); and to proofread your latest draft (point 8).

3. Take advantage of your client’s glossary
If your client has included a glossary with your project details, this will help you with terminology and phrasing. Of course, you won’t be given a glossary for every task, which is where reading around the subject will help you – especially your client’s website or previous publications.

4. Be consistent and clear with terminology
You might find that there four or five words you could use to refer to the same thing. That doesn’t mean you should use them all! Whereas some people preach that variety makes for a more interesting text, you could also risk losing your reader if they mistakenly think you’re talking about two or more different things. Maintain clarity in your text by using the same term or phrase every time.

5. Use clear nouns/pronouns
In the same way, it’s better to say “Harriet said” / “Harriet did” then ambiguously refer to “she”. You can always remove any unnecessary repetition later.

6. Keep sentences brief
Short sentences are very clear. They are harder to misinterpret. Longer sentences like this, full of sub-clauses or long lists of nouns, verbs or other terms, which may or may not cover more than one topic – such as your client’s approach to computer technology in addition to their human resource policy – may technically be grammatically correct, but they will strain the focus of your reader and leave more room for error or misunderstanding.

7. Translate meaning, not words
The website Anglocom says, “Be the reader’s advocate … make the effort to understand the content and purpose of your text, then translate it as simply as possible.” This is especially important when translating idioms, which rarely translate literally. You will have a deeper understanding of the meaning in your text if you read around the subject (point 1) and take advantage of your client’s glossary (point 2).

8. Run it through a free grammar checker
Microsoft Word, or a website like Grammarly, can give you a quick check on your spelling, punctuation and grammar. They are far from perfect and can’t be relied on, but they might help you catch some stray typos. It will get your text in better shape to pass to your editor, client or supervisor even if it’s not the final draft.

9. Add notes for your editor or client
If a sentence was particularly challenging, add a comment to your text to explain what you’re trying to say. This may be impractical if you’re writing back to your client (who expects flawless work), but if you work with a proofreader or editor then they may find this invaluable, and it may possibly avoid errors due to misinterpretation, and save you time on back-and-forth questions.

10. Learn about translation itself
Whenever you aren’t translating, do some reading about translation itself. Translatorthoughts is a specialised website that provides translators with tips and some very helpful tools, including techniques and a translator’s glossary of terms. The advice to writers is: when you’re not writing, read. The same applies to translators – the more reading you do of the language you’re translating into, the more you will improve your skills.

Is there any advice you’d like on translating? If you have a question or comment, let me know!

—db

Finding time to write

Image: http://www.picturesandstories.com

So, what’s new with you?

You get up, go to work, then have a shorter evening than you’d like before bed. Maybe you have to bundle the kids off to school in the morning and collect them later, cook for them and watch over them. Maybe you’re single and dating even though it’s dark and cold out. Maybe you have a beloved dog to walk or a house to clean or a relative to take care of. Maybe there’s just a lot of TV to catch up on.

How do you find time to write with all that going on?

As a proofreader and editor I work with students, translators, prose and poetry writers. When I’m fortunate enough to get return business, the gaps are often explained as being the result of simply being too busy, or not finding the time to write lately.

So what’s the solution?

You can’t make more time. You probably can’t stop doing one thing to make more room for writing, either (although if your problem is TV, sort it out. No TV is that good).

Lifestyles can be busy, especially when we make them busy. Are we so social because we hate to be alone? Do we succumb to all of that easy entertainment because we don’t want to have the space to think? Not only are these problems that should be sorted out, they’re also problems with a built-in solution for your writing woes: stop doing them for a while, and write about them instead, or at least the things that motivated you to do them. Take two weeks off and try.

When my life gets busy, my problem isn’t that I don’t have time to write, but that when I do have time I don’t feel like it. I’m not ready to think and work after all the thinking and working I do at my day job and then freelancing in the evening and at weekends. If I feel a moment of creative inspiration, I have to get home (or at least move from one room to another) and get set up. By the time I have a steaming cup of tea on my desk and the laptop is booted up, I’ve lost it. The inspiration is gone and I’m staring at a blinking cursor in an empty Word document.

A solution that works for my particular lifestyle is routine. One of my favourite writers, Haruki Murakami, has a famously rigid routine that he says not only makes him productive, but also brings him great joy. Murakami-san has the luxury of being successful enough to not need a day job, but a writing routine certainly helps the rest of us, too. Not the usual insipid “write 500 words a day, every day!” advice, but more allocate yourself a time slot amidst the chaos to write. It doesn’t even have to be daily. Just choose a particular time of the week (or day) that is set aside solely for writing. Not only will you find peace in the routine, but you might also even look forward to it. On days where your inspiration comes at other times, jump right in. Then, when your routine writing window arrives, you can rejoice in how you’re already two pages further into that thesis or novel you’re working on.

Personally, I try to get home from the office and immediately start writing. My brain isn’t yet fried, or numbed from a couple of hours of evening TV, and I’m still ‘on the go’ and energised. I’ll aim for 30-60, and if I’m inspired to write for longer then I will. Unfortunately that time is usually when I want to be whipping up a quick meal and stuffing my face, so there’s sometimes a compromise. In any case, I’m slowly making progress with my creative work as a result of choosing a routine instead of hoping for a break in the storm.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

—db

 

‘Rick and Morty’ – Why do we love Rick?

‘Rick and Morty’ is a much-beloved animated TV show that follows a nihilistic super-genius scientist (Rick) and his hapless grandson (Morty) on madcap adventures involving time-travel, dimension-hopping and interstellar travel.

If you haven’t seen the show, its popularity might seem strange when you learn that Rick Sanchez is one of the most unpleasant characters on television. He’s the hero of the show, but he’s also a high-functioning alcoholic who constantly wears a splash of discoloured saliva on his chin, belches obnoxiously mid-sentence, and generally does whatever takes his fancy or whatever will further his quest for scientific discovery – including theft, cold-blooded murder and brutally insulting his family members, which whom he lives.

To Rick, young Morty is a “walking burlap sack of turds”. He calls his grandchildren “pieces of shit” and claims he can prove it mathematically. He said of Jerry, his daughter Beth’s cowardly self-victimising husband, “You survive because people think ‘Oh, this poor piece of shit, he never gets a break, I can’t stand the deafening silent wails of his wilting soul, I’ll hire him or marry him’.”

Harsh.

Rick asserts that he is “surrounded by inferior pieces of shit” and savagely insults the intelligence of his mostly-likeable grandkids and just about anyone else around him. Granted, he is a proven genius of significant resource and guile, so his arrogance may not be misplaced. But he is undoubtedly mean, selfish and disgusting.

So why is Rick one of the most likeable characters on the show?

Could it lie in the show’s great writing?

Most of the characters on ‘Rick and Morty’ are three-dimensional and endearing, despite possessed of some pretty serious emotional problems. The success of the show could come down to the balancing of its fine comedy (at the same time blindingly intelligent and scatological) against its ability to make us care about the characters, their flaws, and the promise of their redemption. Even Jerry’s doomed marriage to Beth (they are described as co-dependent and hateful of both themselves and each other) is a point of remorse for the characters’ many fans.

Viewers were unexpectedly moved in an early episode, when Morty is forced to replace a dead version of himself in a parallel reality and carry on with his life as though nothing happened. Morty sits on the sofa with the doppelgangers of his family, staring at an identical version of his home in bewilderment.

On the surface, Rick is vicious, egotistical and self-centred. But the show gradually reveals his nihilistic world-view (or universes-view), which might explain his often-dour expression. Nothing matters in an uncaring reality, he would say. Rick abandoned his daughter as a child to pursue his scientific endeavours and never showed any sign of regret, even though Beth’s abandonment issues are the reason she is trapped in a depressing marriage and is too afraid to confront her dad about the dungeon he built under their garage where he imprisons aliens.

And yet, in the Season 2 finale, Rick sacrifices his freedom for the sake of his family, a moment meaningfully underscored by “Hurt” from Nine Inch Nails. Rick’s nonsensical catchphrase, always said with verve and a smile, is revealed to secretly translate as “I am in great pain, please help me”.

But it isn’t Rick’s unforced depth of character, unusual for an animated TV series, that makes a largely hateful man likable.

It’s because no matter his methods, Rick is good at what he does.

It would be pointless to list Rick’s fictional scientific achievements (like the microscopic universe containing a civilization he created to power his car battery), but they are beside the point. It’s Rick’s surety and expertise that frequently save the day.

This essay on writing from writer Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) explains the need to have your protagonist be good at what they do – He calls it establishing your authority. By showing your reader that your protagonist really knows what they’re talking about, you are creating a character that not only feels real, but is endearing. No matter how flawed or even evil your character may be, if they are an expert at something then there is something for the reader to admire. At the same time, the reader will trust you to tell a story that is convincing:

“Prove to your reader that you’ve done your research. That your narrator is the best, most-qualified person to tell this story. This method won’t engage the reader emotionally […] but it can be impressive and compelling.”

Palahniuk calls this the “Head Method”. It counterbalances the more common “Heart Method”, appealing to your character’s feelings and making them emotionally believable.

“You could also argue that Tom Clancy uses the Head Method. The way military and government procedures and technology are used to assure a reader that the protagonist is smart and trained – and therefore worth spending time with. This includes wonderful insider, jargon-y language.”

Palahniuk refers to The Contortionist’s Handbook, a novel by Craig Clevenger, who uses “a wealth of information to establish the narrator’s authority as a forger – a criminal so adept at his job that we can forgive his crimes because we’re so impressed by his obsessive, methodical work habits and skill.”

Palahnium knows what he’s talking about: One of the best things about Fight Club (book or film) is that every other line is a bit of information you didn’t know – what goes into a homemade bomb, or how a cinema project reel works. Learning as you go, you begin to intimiately trust the narrator as well as the writer. You realise you’re reading “something good”, not to mention informative and fun.

Rick is an arsehole, but he can always explain a complicated situation and how he is going to resolve it. Whether it’s more basic expositional dialogue, like explaining the characteristics of a particular alien race to the clueless Morty, or filling the viewer in on the plot so far, the result is that Rick is shown to be knowledgeable and capable.

How capable is Rick? In one episode he finds himself transformed into a sentient pickle, unable to move, and washed into a sewer. When anyone else would shrivel up and rot, Rick bites the head off a cockroach, uses his tongue to stimulate the nerves in its exposed brain, and uses its corpse to build an exoskeleton out of rat bones and sinew. Soon enough he’s on his way home to get himself de-picklised. The episode is a celebration of his unbridled genius, even though meanwhile his family is in a therapy session discussing Rick’s unrelenting selfishness.

But the ‘Head Method’ is as dicey a writing approach as any other. Take it too far and you run the risk of realising the ‘unique protagonist asset‘ trope, basically making your hero a superhero and suspending disbelief (Think MacGyver making a functional defibrillator out of some candlesticks and a live wire). A moderate example would be Jason Bourne, whose excellent combat skills set him apart from his foes even though he doesn’t remember how he got them.

‘Rick and Morty’ has come highly recommended by me for some time, but it’s only the most recent two seasons that have shown Rick at his worst, and at his best. For writers looking for tips on characterisation, pay close attention to the twisted psychology of Beth and Jerry and the co-dependent conflict evident in their marriage, and the scientific brilliance of an otherwise hateful Rick.

Imagine a Rick who was bad at science, who had no expertise at all … Would he still be likeable?

—db

An evolutionary basis for storytelling

A recent article by Helen Briggs of the BBC tells how the human love affair with stories might have an evolutionary basis: an almost cathartic effect that releases ‘natural painkillers’ in the form of endorphins and fosters social bonding. According to the article:

The human fascination with story telling was forged in ancient times when we began to live in hunter gatherer communities, said Prof Robin Dunbar, who led the research [into why we’re attracted to dramatic, and even upsetting, narratives such as tear-jerking films].

“Fiction is widely studied by humanities academics as it is an important feature of human society, common to all cultures,” said Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University.

“There are good social reasons: folklore enables us to pass on wisdom or ingrain community values, bringing us together. While that is important, it does not fully explain why we are willing to return again and again to be entertained.”

He thinks our affinity for emotive fiction may have evolved in the context of cohesion of social groups, as the endorphin effect has also been seen in comedy, singing and dancing.

“This is not to say that this one chemical effect alone is the only reason for dramatic fiction – there are other aspects of human psychology at work – but we believe that it is an important reason for our enjoyment of fiction,” he added.

—db

New paperback releases!

I’m thrilled to announce that my novels ‘The Gun of Our Maker’ and ‘Cycles of Udaipur’ are now available as actual, physical, smell-the-pages paperback editions!

Don’t have an e-reader? Now you don’t need one to experience the literary wonders you see before you. Already have the e-book versions? Get a hard copy too and then your friends will be impressed by the taste of your bookcase!

Order your paperback of ‘The Gun of Our Maker’ by clicking here.

Order your paperback of ‘Cycles of Udaipur’ by clicking here.

You can see my original e-book release posts here (‘GOOM‘) and here (‘COU‘).

As always, if you read either version of the novels then please leave a review so that other readers can see what you thought of them. Sales are massively affected by positive reviews and, since I have no marketing clout, I rely on reviews almost exclusively to keep these novels from slipping into oblivion.

Thanks to everyone who’s given me their support over the years!

—db

Free short stories from David Brookes!

About a year ago I chose to give up writing genre fiction, which I’d been writing since I was 13, and focus on what I considered more ‘literary’ fiction. With the exception of the re-release of ‘Half Discovered Wings’, my first novel (2009) and a fantasy, which was more for nostalgia than anything else, my efforts have been towards more meaningful (and marketable) fiction:

• The Gun of Our Maker (2015)
• Love is an Eye that Doesn’t See (2015)
• Cycles of Udaipur (2016)

I also discontinued sale of some of my other material that was available on Amazon and Smashworlds, namely the science fiction short story collection ‘The Gas Giant Sequence’ and the steampunk fantasy adventure stories in my ‘Professor Arnustace’ series. Although I’m super proud of these works, which were a lot of fun to write, and despite the fact that they sold far more than my other releases, they weren’t fitting with the direction I wanted to go in. I know, how arty of me.

It’s both pleasing and distressing that I’ve had such a response from readers about this. The second ‘Professor Arnustace’ story in particular had some of my best reviews, and I still get messages asking whether there will be a third. Although I don’t have plans for the gentleman detective, as a thank-you I’ve decided to make all my discontinued stories available here for free. Yay!

You will need to connect your e-reader to your computer to copy across the files to your device.

Happy reading!

–db

---

The Gas Giant Sequence

Part 1: Krill
Part 2: Split
Part 3: Tranquil Sea
Part 4: Tulpa

---

The Professor Arnustace Stories

Story 1: An Account of a Curious Encounter
Story 2: Iced Tea for Professor Arnustace

---

 

What is line-editing, and do I need it?

 

As part of my short series on editorial processes, I will be looking at proofreading, line-editing and copy-editing to give some insight onto the features that distinguish them from one another. Last month I looked at proofreading. This article covers a more substantive approach, line-editing.

What is line-editing?
Line-editing, unsurprisingly, works at the ‘line level’ of your text. Often confused with copy-editing (the subject of a future post), this is not a more intensive proofread, but a genuine deep edit that examines the detail of your writing to generally enhance your work. A line-editor will help with clumsy wording and sentence structure, improving your clarity and flow, and fact-checking. It could involve the moving, cutting or adding of whole paragraphs (or, if you really need it, chapters). This is generally what most laypeople think of as “editing”.

A deeper look
A proofreader looks for errors such as typos or obvious blunders. A copy-editor will work on things like grammar and consistency of language and regional spelling (i.e. UK or US English). A line-editor’s job usually comes before both of these things, and works hard to draw out the best from every line in your text. It could be considered “heavy editing” and, at the end of the process, you may be looking at a completely different piece of writing to the one you started with.

Rewording of sentences will help get rid of unnecessary passive voice, extensive adverbs (which Stephen King described as paving ‘the road to hell’) repeated words and phrases, tautology, cliché, overwriting, and mixed or broken metaphors and similes. There’s also an element of fact-checking and improving on the writer’s general voice and style.

Voice is something that I would prefer not to interfere with as an editor, but sometimes it’s necessary. Take a novel. If the writer’s personal voice is too strong, it can draw the reader out of the moment and spoil the illusion that all good fiction strives for. Charlotte Brontë is often lauded for breaking this illusion in Jayne Eyre (“Reader, I married him.”) and good editors have been undoing the damage she caused ever since! Voice should not be confused with style, which is (read “should be”) unique to every writer and carries an element of their voice within it.

Tone is also examined, to make sure that it’s appropriate. In an autobiography I would expect the writer’s voice, style and tone to naturally be perfectly appropriate, since it’s their story after all, but even here tone can distract or confuse the reader. It wouldn’t do to make jokes throughout the chapter of your heartbreaking divorce, for example, but the very nature of reliving such an upsetting episode could interfere with the writer’s sense of what’s appropriate for the scene. Likewise, a children’s picture book with a deadly serious tone probably wouldn’t go down so well (“I must protest, Sam-I-Am. I most sincerely would prefer not to eat your green eggs and ham.”).

I generally consider my job as a line-editor to scrub out anything that holds the text back and, if possible, also elevate the text to something closer to the writer’s original vision for their work, helping with vocabulary, sentence structure and imagery. I would also work (in the case of fiction) on characterisation, plotting and originality.

In terms of an ongoing editing process, I would expect line-editing to come first. Once the writer has written their first draft and given it a once- (or twice-) over and can no longer see how it can be improved, the line-editor gets a go. You could, potentially, end up with something completely different by the time they’ve finished, but it should be improved. The reason this would come before copy-editing is because there’s no use having a copy-editor scour your novel for problems with grammar, typos and other minute issues if the line-editor is going to cut that pointless dream sequence or rewrite all your dialogue afterwards.

Do I really need a line-editor?
How do I answer this?  YES … Probably.

If you’ve finished working on a blog post or some SEO content for a website, there’s a case for saying that deep editing is unlikely to be a major advantage. Generally your proofreader, if they’re feeling generous, will point out any glaring errors whilst correcting your typos.However, if English isn’t your first language or if you’re a new hand at writing, an editor will really help you to develop simply by showing you where you might be going wrong (ideally with some helpful annotations to justify their changes and suggestions).

If you’re writing an essay, you’d be better off with a copy-editor than a proofreader so that you can have your grammar examined (not all proofreaders consider grammar part of their purview), and a line-editor may be of use there too. Most substantive edits will be a mixture of line-editing and copy-editing anyway, so it’s important to talk with your editor to discuss exactly what you expect from the process. Many fiction writers, when looking for an editor, are seeking a line-editor who will work on their copy too.

The people who I know who have undergone a third-party editing process have always been very relieved that they did!

Finally…

…learn from your editor!

—db

 

Back to the Future: Writing Honest Science Fiction

If you own a TV or have access to the internet, you’ve probably already heard that today is “Future Day” – the day that Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to from 1985 in “Back to the Future: Part II”. The film depicted a future wildly different from today’s reality – hoverboards instead of skateboards, flying cars (and white vans), and peculiar fashions that never quite made it.

As the world celebrates this fun adventure trilogy of films, which are some of my childhood favourites, there’s plenty of opportunity to see how the fictional future of BttF2 stacks up against real-life 2015.

Of course, the films were never meant to accurately predict what 2015 would look like. I’m sure the writers and production crew had plenty of serious discussions about the practical likelihood of certain aspects, but the overriding factor would be originality and humour (and the odd call-back to the previous film, such as the skateboard sequence). No-one can blame BttF for being inaccurate, so let’s just enjoy the spectacle.

It does beggar the question, however, of how to accurately predict the future when writing science fiction. No-one can predict the future, but we can make pretty good guesses. The age-old question of whether science is influenced by science fiction (such as the constant efforts to create hover technology from “Back to the Future”, lightsabers from “Star Wars” and teleportation machines from “Star Trek”) is probably quite pertinent. Sadly, as writers, we can hardly create a future filled with lightsabers simply because that’s a possibility – it would be unoriginal, not to mention fodder for Disney’s legal team (in case you forgot, Disney own “Star Wars” now. Ack.)

I wrote my first novel when I was thirteen. It was a wholly unoriginal science fiction story heavily influenced by “The X-Files”, “The Terminator” and “Back to the Future”. In “Fourth Millennium”, which will hopefully never be leaked onto the internet, my protagonist was a desperate hovercraft racer who undertakes an illegal cyberization procedure to give him faster reflexes. During his next race he is unwittingly blasted a thousand years into the future, where he must prevent a shady cyborg and government organisations from destroying the world with insectoid alien clones.

Yeah, tell me about it.

Needless to say, I soon realised that I should never attempt to publish “Fourth Millennium” or its tedious sequels. They may have been fun for me to write, but aside from the originality aspect, they could hardly be considered accurate depictions of the future. Who can guess what the year 3,000 will look like, if the human race is even still here?

I’m reminded of a piece of literature a lecturer of mine mentioned once. I wish I could remember the name of the story or the writer. In it, a future several hundred years from now is depicted. Modern sci-fi writers have ridiculed the story because the only noticeable difference between the time period in which it was written and the supposed future was that people sat in chairs that floated. Several hundred years of scientific development. Woe betide any writer who makes the same mistake.

Scientific advancement is zipping along at light-speed, so the likes of “Back to the Future” can be forgiven. In just 75 years we have seen the invention of television, colour television, flat screen television, 3D television … smart phones barely larger than credit cards that include sophisticated cameras, calculators, calendars, address books and video games … Gaming that has progressed from Pong to Donkey Kong to Sonic the Hedgehog to Ocarina of Time to The Last of Us (see also my earlier article on the development of the Final Fantasy video game series) … cinema technology that has developed from “Mabel’s Strange Predicament” to “Casablanca” to “Back to the Future” to “Avatar” (Cineworld Sheffield is currently constructing our first “4D” cinema screen) … All within the span of a single lifetime.

My first serious science fiction novel, “Faith in Chrome”, was set 80 years into the future. I decided to be inventive but fairly realistic. I decided that the world would feature sophisticated artificial intelligence programs, but that they were tightly restricted. There would be convenient personal tools in the form of microscopic nanomachines, but that they were expensive and not commercially available. There would be hovering vehicles, but that regular roads, shipping lanes and air travel were generally preferred. Video games are fully immersive online hallucinary experiences. Many processes were mechanised, such as sentry guard duty. Why not? There would be no space travel or alien encounters, not since NASA had its hands tied under Obama and for as long as the Drake equation is our best “evidence” of otherworldly life (although there have been exciting developments on Mars this year, and I’m not talking about Matt Damon’s latest film).

So how can science fiction be more honest, practical and – ultimately – accurate?

Assuming that this is your goal, rather than the wild and brilliant fun-scapes of Iain M. Bank’s Culture books for example, then we can simply extrapolate. My earlier paragraph about TVs, phones and video games should give you a starting point. See where we have been, what we have now, and ask “what next”? Ask yourself if your ideas are practical. Will these inventions be too expensive to make commercially, and therefore cost-prohibitive for most of the world? Were they derived from military technology, as most of our best tech today is? Are they too impractical or unsafe to use (why use expensive, power-hungry laser rifles when lead bullets are cheap and just as deadly?)…? Who would fund their development and why?

As you ponder what your future will look like, enjoy this message from Doc Brown himself, which is as poignant as it is corny:

—db

6 scientific tips to improve your writing (reblog – University of Florida)

Image source: http://www.grammarly.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/original.jpg

I was recently recommended this post from the University of Florida, featured on www.futority.org, which deals with some fairly new science on writing. It’s a fascinating read, but don’t feel bad if you have to read it twice, like I did…

There was no reblog functionality on the original site, so I give full credit here. Please do check out www.futority.org when you get some time, as it’s a great site in itself.

—db

---

6 scientific tips to improve your writing

A new book uses insights into the reading brain to give writers clear-cut, science-based guidelines on how to write anything well, from an email to a multi-million-dollar proposal.

Yellowlees Douglas, an associate professor of management communication at the University of Florida, wrote the book to satisfy her frustrated students’ needs for a guide to writing that “didn’t just tell my students to imitate Hemingway, as one of them put it,” Douglas says.

“Here I was, teaching quantitative thinkers in the colleges of business and medicine, and every book I assigned had my students ready to tear their hair out.”

So Douglas wrote The Reader’s Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer (Cambridge University Press, 2015), drawing off the data that had first snagged her interest decades earlier while investigating the impacts of multimedia documents on reading.

The book uses data from eye-tracking, EEG brain scans, and fMRI neuroimaging, some of which give scientific backing to the usefulness of old standbys like thesis sentences and active voice. However, the book also dispels many well-worn myths, like avoiding beginning sentences with “and.”

The Reader’s Brain also provides insight into where to put information you want readers to remember—and where to stash disclosures you’d rather they forget. Even the cadence of your sentences, the book argues, subconsciously cues your readers to your skill as a writer.

“People who work with data think systematically,” Douglas says, “and, if you tell them to do something, they automatically want to know, ‘Where’s the data?’ Having published in the sciences, I know exactly how they feel.”

Six tips for better writing

1. Prime your readers

“Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.” Few of us realize this advice has its roots in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. In recent decades, researchers have discovered that priming is a form of implicit learning. By merely exposing experimental subjects to lists of random words, researchers discovered the earlier exposure triggered accurate recall a day later—even though the subjects were unaware they would be tested later on the list.

When you tell readers your purpose in the first sentences of a memo, email, or proposal, you bolster their ease of comprehension and increase their recall of content later.

2. Use ‘recency’ to your advantage

The last item in the “Tell them” triad refers to what psychologists call recency effects, which influence our ability to remember the last items we read. Recency effects extend to both short-term and long-term memory. Readers remember final sentences in paragraphs, items in lists, and paragraphs in documents more clearly than anything else they read.

[Writing and speaking are totally separate in the brain]

Carefully compose that call-to-action paragraph in a proposal and concluding paragraph in your next report. And that final sentence in every opening paragraph in your emails? Dedicate that sentence to whatever action you need your readers to take—and when they should do it.

3. Disappoint without destroying good will

You can benefit from the strength of priming and recency effects when you have to tell a client you’re unable to meet a deadline or inform an employee she’s not getting the position she applied for. How? Priming and recency effects create a “dead zone” in the middles of lists, sentences, paragraphs, and entire documents.

4. Bury bad news

You can prime the reader with a neutral opening paragraph, one with content that’s neither misleadingly encouraging or straight-to-the-point bad news. Clinical studies attest to the impact of negative news in a first paragraph creating resistance and hostility to the rest of the message.

[Bad writing could get scientists more citations]

Open your second paragraph with a rationale for the unwelcome part of your message—the cause for the effect you’re going to explore. Then embed the most lethal content in a minor clause in the dead center of the paragraph. Close that paragraph with a neutral sentence, mentioning whatever benefits you can conjure to offer your reader.

Then craft a short, positive paragraph as your closing that’s forward-looking, maintaining your readers’ goodwill by using the document’s recency position. Your reader will get the message without getting hostile toward you.

5. Harness cause and effect

From an evolutionary perspective, our tendency to see cause and effect everywhere is essential to our survival. When you place the rationale for a negative decision before you tell your reader the decision itself, you leverage the power of causation.

In studies dating back to the 1940s, participants invariably described footage of simple, animated squares and triangles in terms of cause and effect. Your reader is also highly susceptible to seeing causation. When you turn sentences into micro-narratives of cause and effect, you make your writing easier to read and recall.

6. Don’t let passive voice drag you down

You’ve probably already heard about the evils of passive construction: placing an outcome at the beginning of your sentence, in the grammatical subject, using a non-action verb, and generally burying the actor responsible. But English is a subject-verb-object language, and readers also expect language to obey what linguists call the iconicity assumption.

In other words, we expect the order of items in a sentence to reflect the order in which they occurred in the world. When you use passive construction, readers’ brains show more activity—and reading speed slows down, no matter how simple your content.

Source: University of Florida

Building Character: originality, style and idol worship

I recently had the pleasure of being introduced to a new friend from Japan, and we immediately hit it off over our love of manga and video games. As a nerd stranded in the world of ‘grown-ups’, I rarely get the chance to have deep conversations about these favourite topics of mine, and took advantage of it.

It turned out we had a shared love of the Final Fantasy video games. Final Fantasy is a series of story-based roleplaying games, typically involving very strong storylines and characters. Often lasting longer than 40 hours from beginning to end, the gamer has more opportunity to be immersed in the fictional fantasy world of the game and come to know the protagonists in ways that aren’t often possible in films, or even novels. Because the series – which has 15 main titles and dozens of spin-offs, expansions and remakes – has been constantly reinvented since the first title in 1987, it has the benefit of each new generation of gaming technology and has drastically changed in terms of visual and musical style, as well as modes of storytelling and gameplay. The series’ incredible score, produced by Japanese composer Nobuo Uematsu, has entries in the ClassicFM Hall of Fame and there are several orchestral concerts around the world celebrating his great talent. The franchise also includes a couple of feature films, animated series and the usual marketing fluff.

---

Graphical evolution – 1987 to 2015

The original Final Fantasy (1987 – Nintendo Entertainment System)

Final Fantasy IV (1991- Nintendo Entertainment System) Remake

Final Fantasy VII (1997 – Sony PlayStation)

Final Fantasy X (2001 – Sony PlayStation 2) HD remake

Final Fantasy XIII (2009 – Sony PlayStation 3)

Final Fantasy XV (2015 – Sony PlayStation 4)

---

Because of the dramatic shift in technological capability, the series has advanced from extremely simple, cartoonish games to high-powered, cinema-quality visuals. As such, there has been a growing emphasis on the visual design of the characters, incorporating not only realistic object textures and facial expressions, but intricate costume design and idiosyncratic body language.

The discussions with my Japanese friend revolved around whether it was a good thing that characters could be so realistically represented on-screen, and whether this was a distraction from the core purpose of a video game: the fun and accessibility of its gameplay.

My friend argued that the owner of the Final Fantasy franchise, Square Enix, should concentrate less on dramatic video-style cut-scenes like this:

---

---

…and return to its roots with simplistic graphics. Her reasoning was that the emphasis on visuals had diluted the gameplay, turning the games into merely interactive cinema experiences, but more significantly promoting ‘idol worship’.

In Asia, idol worship is a problem amongst young people whose lives are driven by pressure to study, qualify for a good job, earn a high salary and marry well. In fact, issues such as internet and gaming addiction are so prevalent that teenagers have died from playing video games for several days straight. In China, there are camps for youngsters who need to be ‘re-educated’ in how to detach themselves from technology and live more in the real (albeit stressful) world. Idol worship is a connected phenomenon where companies such as Square Enix are idolised for providing powerful entertainment franchises and are seen as being able to do no wrong. This is particularly striking in the ‘geek culture’ which is often characterised by extreme polarised views and almost obsessive loyalty and fandom.

Final Fantasy has boasted a cast of strong protagonists who are also the subjects of fan worship. Perhaps the most revered is Cloud, the hero of Final Fantasy VII, who is a heroic but troubled soldier. Epitomising many admirable qualities, such as loyalty, bravery and strength, Cloud is also casual and cool despite his significant past traumas. It is perhaps needless to say that Cloud’s moody demeanour, coupled with his heroic traits, are particularly appealing to male teenaged gamers.

Cloud Strife, the aptly-named troubled protagonist of Final Fantasy VII, as depicted in the high-res animated film ‘Final Fantasy: Advent Children’

Cloud was so popular that he was emulated in a later game in the series by the designers of Lightning, the female hero of Final Fantasy XIII who shares many of his qualities (she and her allies can be seen in the Youtube clip earlier in this post).

Characters are important to more storytelling genres that just video games, of course, and so the issue of characterisation is wider reaching. My friend asserted that the advancements of computer graphics means that more attention is paid to the visual design of characters, strengthening their superficial qualities whilst weakening the game. I held that strong characters are integral to a strong story, and should never be overlooked.

In Final Fantasy VII, Cloud occasionally serves as a bland protagonist on whom gamers can imprint their own personality, an effective tactic from earlier games in which some protagonists never speak at all (early first person shooters and RPGs are prime examples). He rarely speaks and his thoughts are hidden from the gamer. Much like protagonists in (bad) first person literature, he is the focal point for events that happen, rather than a character who drives the plot forward, and much of the story’s strong characterisation is embodied by the characters who accompany him. The game encourages players to speculate on Cloud’s inner workings – a necessary device to build up to a major plot twist later in the story. However, would the story’s famous twists and surprises be as emotionally powerful without characterisation?

A story can only be as strong as its characters, and if the reader (or viewer/player) cares little for the fate of those characters, then all dramatic tension is lost. It is true that characters in a visual medium are often defined by their visual appearance and style, which is a superficial method that does not create the best protagonists.

Originality is a key issue in characterisation, the neglect of which writers of crime thrillers and fantasy fiction are particularly guilty. One way of overcoming that is a striking visual appearance, but this should not overshadow the development of the character’s mental and emotional state, motivations and desires. It’s possible that characters are idolised in certain genres, but this is nothing new: action heroes in films and moral exemplars in literature have always been around (the recent furore over the retroactive characterisation of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s ‘new’ book is of note). Should this mean that characters should be less defined, or that superficial qualities should be abandoned? I feel that the answer is obvious, and that fiction is weaker, possibly broken, without those factors.

I do encourage debate on these questions, particularly on whether idolisation of characters could ever be a negative thing. Who are your favourite characters in fiction, and why?

—db