the dan brown code
In honor of The Da Vinci Code film, I urge everyone to check out these excellent posts on Language Log by Geoffrey Pullum regarding Dan Brown's prose "stylings", if you haven't read them yet.
The Dan Brown Code is the first, and additional links to more are at the bottom of that post. I especially like Learning the ropes in the trenches with Dan Brown.
This is what I used to love about reading MSTs of fan fiction. So many people write at varying levels of skill, but so few write beautifully, even among professionals. If you care about writing, it's incredibly valuable to see careless prose picked apart like this.
And while Dan Brown is an outlier on the low quality side, anyone can make mistakes; even Shakespeare mixed metaphors! After all, how exactly do you take arms against a sea of troubles?
(I will say that I think Mr. Pullum goes a little too far in his analysis of the phrase "moved briskly about"; he seems to infer a great deal about the phrase based on a source that I think is a great deal less widespread than he seems to imagine. But whatever. Mostly he's dead-on.)
The Dan Brown Code is the first, and additional links to more are at the bottom of that post. I especially like Learning the ropes in the trenches with Dan Brown.
This is what I used to love about reading MSTs of fan fiction. So many people write at varying levels of skill, but so few write beautifully, even among professionals. If you care about writing, it's incredibly valuable to see careless prose picked apart like this.
And while Dan Brown is an outlier on the low quality side, anyone can make mistakes; even Shakespeare mixed metaphors! After all, how exactly do you take arms against a sea of troubles?
(I will say that I think Mr. Pullum goes a little too far in his analysis of the phrase "moved briskly about"; he seems to infer a great deal about the phrase based on a source that I think is a great deal less widespread than he seems to imagine. But whatever. Mostly he's dead-on.)