To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Collection: Careers toolkit. Van Savage, a theoretical biologist and ecologist, first met McCarthy in , and they overlapped at the SFI for about four years while Savage was a graduate student and then a postdoc.
Savage has received invaluable editing advice from McCarthy on several science papers published over the past 20 years. These pieces of advice were combined with thoughts from evolutionary biologist Pamela Yeh and are presented here. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.
This theme and these points form the single thread that runs through your piece. The words, sentences, paragraphs and sections are the needlework that holds it together. A single sentence can be a paragraph. Each paragraph should explore that message by first asking a question and then progressing to an idea, and sometimes to an answer. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations.
Avoid footnotes because they break the flow of thoughts and send your eyes darting back and forth while your hands are turning pages or clicking on links. Try to avoid jargon, buzzwords or overly technical language.
Just choose one, or you risk that your readers will give up. Just enjoy writing. Nature collection: Mentoring. Speak the sentence aloud to find pauses. I get the feeling you would have forced that comment regardless of what else was written. Poor Roger was convicted of treason carried out in Germany but on the detection of a virule, a prototype comma, in the medieval act covering treason written in Norman French, the interpretation was such that he was found guilty.
Why would you feel a need to bleat out that Casement, a true patriot, was gay? What possible relevance has it, true or otherwise?? Your mindless post has driven me to it. Written language has grown closer and closer to spoken language. Many readers including myself, like to see a comma where a speaker would pause briefly in delivery.
I think that Cormac McCarthy wants to emulate spoken language as closely as he can. That, I believe, is the motivation for the long sentences that typify the McCarthy style. I would have preferred McCarthy to use commas more. To me, a long sentence without commas suggests a droning monotone. This article has given me much to think about. In some cases, it makes a difference. There are many letters, btw, that cover a span of several years.
It also felt limiting in how detailed I could be with events, etc. I actually got comments to this effect from readers. I ended up testing both styles on multiple readers and got a consensus that the quotes added clarity.
And so far no new readers have mentioned them as feeling unnatural within the letters. On the other hand, it could be the skill of the writer, meaning me! Does anyone else find it terrifying to write and article like this or even comment on it?
One slip of a grammatical nature and anything you write goes up in smoke. As a writer, I find those punctuation rules rather restrictive and would inevitably confuse his poor readers.
Rules are good where appropriate, not in extreme. McCarthy is an amazing writer. The Road is, as someone wrote above, damn near poetry. I cannot agree that all writing should be this way. Not all stories have the same tone or feel. And I think varying sentence length can often strengthen a piece of writing, moreso than aiming for tyrannical consistency. McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian which is one of the greatest books of the modern age.
McCarthy makes it work. If you want to live without quotation marks and commas, go ahead. Providing very minimal punctuation but instead relying on the natural rhythms of sentences is frequently a crap shoot. Writing with fairly generous punctuation, although maybe not easy on the eyes, is more than likely to assist with comprehension and communication.
What a blow hard. The rules of punctuation are not subject to interpretation. You prescriptive grammarian types, always eating the shell and spitting out the kernel. McCarthy is one of the greatest and most original writers of the last century.
He makes his style work and work brilliantly. About every pages Cormac pens a bombshell of a sentence, and I stop in wonder of it. In reading The Road I became the third person with them in the story. I would try to figure out how did he write like this. I look for books that do this but nothing. Like one reviewer I saw, wrote: I. Showing the short sentenes Cormac uses. Wodehouse, for instance.
Some of McCarthy is good, some of it bad. He strives too much to be literary when he ought to strive for clarity. Punctuation is an interesting topic for some readers. The punctuation thing is something that gets me.
Instead of breaking it up into easily-digestible per-sentence pieces, McCarthy uses the multiple conjunctions to overwhelm the reader in one go. The best example is the Commanche ambush, which has almost one-page sentences, which hits the audience all at once. Two independent clauses separated by a comma can be a beautiful thing. Long unpunctuated sentences may offer a stylistic effect, breathless speech or intensity, for example, but too much of anything can be monotonous, fatiguing, artless.
Actually what you are doing there is wrong, and should instead be punctuated with a colon as you are developing what came before it: using a semi colon is only recommended for when two sentences, of which the latter sentence has nothing to do with the former, are put together in a single sentence, joined by the semi colon.
Example: The ferocity with which the dog bit her was terrorising: it tore through her skin, she felt herself going faint; the softness with which the cat she had been playing with earlier in the day had bitten her — which she had mistakenly interpreted as ferocious — oh how she wished for that now.
Also yes, I understand before that my example was not that good: in this case I was merely exemplifying what I was saying, rather than trying to create a literary masterpiece in a comments forum. McCarthy leaves out the apostrophes in negative contractions:. See if you can find them. Seems like a lot of you responding in dismay to this article have never bothered to read a full McCarthy novel. I highly recommend Blood Meridian, most likely my favorite book of all time. You will then understand the power of minimizing punctuation, as you can link imagery much more tightly together and forge a landscape and an active moving scene in your mind.
Instead she simply places a dash before dialogue. I think it works pretty nicely. Dead wrong. But do believe that McCarthy has a very good reason for his decision. Grammar is not by necessity prescriptive. The variety of writers who have chosen to use it differently and have become popular makes this clear. In a cluttered, city-set story where a clamor of people are all talking at the same time, the main characters are all very well educated and there are lots of quick events, it might not work.
I am in awe of his imagination and writing style. I attended Catholic schools as a kid and lack of punctuation gave you a slap on the knuckles with a ruler or if you were a boy someone wearing an ankle length black habit and a stiff white collar around her neck aka a nun would take hold of the shorthairs on your neck and Pull it.
Pull it hard. Whack your knuckles with a ruler. A ruler with sharp metal set in the wood. I guess to draw a very straight line or to teach a child a lesson.
Bloody knuckles can scare you straight snd give up your best buddy The three Bad Boys in Outer Dark made my skin crawl. Why did they want to destroy innocents? Punctuation makes writing easier to read. Why make it harder for the reader by eliminating the punctuation? I do think that fixating on non-standard grammar, unfamiliar vocabulary, or other technicalities is a superficial way to evaluate the quality of literary writing. There are myriad ways a novel can be.
And, to return to where I began, I think it is good writing. Good at what? Good for what? Well, one of the things it is unequivocally good at, or good for, is provoking discussions about good or bad writing. Ron Charles in the Washington Post :. At first I kept trying to scoff at it, too, but I was just whistling past the graveyard.
There is no limit to the devastation, only new forms of its expression, and McCarthy renders these up in lush, sensuous prose that belies the inertness of its object and keeps the reader in a constant state of longing and alarm.
Gail Caldwell in the Boston Globe :. Unfolding in a spartan, precise narrative that mirrors the bleakness of its nuclear winter. Mark Holcomb in the Village Voice :. Freeze this frame. His prose is plain, but shows the almost baroque love of unusual and archaic language amidst this plainness that I have always heard associated with him this is my first finished McCarthy novel. At a certain point in the novel, it was teaching me an average of one new word per 8 pages: discalced unshod!
From time to time, a turn of speech will seep through from our time, revealing the possibility that this is an allegory for our politically embattled world.
In setting The Road in a post-apocalyptic world where plot is beside the point and the two main characters are — given their hazily remembered past, monochrome present, and probable lack of a future —inevitably archetypal, McCarthy overuses the stark-but-somehow-simultaneously-baroque tone that eventually threatens to send all his work off the rails.
In this sense, his language fails The Road , distracting from the emotional potency it might have had. Clearly, there are many who disagree.
So few of them reach for anything that exceeds their grasp, and really, how many novels do either? Should we give more credit for successfully playing it safe? Liz, I agree about risk-taking, and I have been thinking that critics like Wood and Maslin are more likely to appreciate McCarthy precisely for that reason — professional readers presumably get pretty tired of writing that plays it safe. Even in his Oprah interview, you can see that he wants to crawl under the chair he is sitting in.
Is this a man that craves attention or recognition of any kind? I understand why: now everyone has access to almost any information at the touch of a button. In order to read The Watchmen, you had to go to a comic book store once a month and buy it.
Now, by the time you finish this post, you can download the entire thing to your phone. It is exactly the opposite of what I want to read about. My opinion on this is demonstrated exactly in Blood Meridian. It is more than an achievement; it is the high water mark of the past 40 years of literature. But it also contains some of the most grotesque and terrifying sequences of violence ever put to the page.
Stick to John Grisham. THAT guy knows where to put an apostrophe. Your point about context is an interesting one. Your point about McCarthy shunning attention is interesting.
I think I too am using his sincerity his commitment to his own artistic vision as a starting point: it justifies taking him seriously. But then, what happens to your opening suggestion that novels ought to stand on their own? Can we discern that sincerity in the writing itself? The Oprah interview is almost comical, they are so ill-matched. It is interesting that you had to look to a mostly positive review of McCarthy to find a negative remark about his writing.
His next leap is where I disagree, however: he would like to say that inherently because They choose many books that may not be up to his standards, all the books They like are bad. Maybe the disconnect is that the only measure we have for a book is when many so-called respected lit folks agree that the book is good.
Even capital S-Science works that way. Someone makes a claim and states why and folks can agree or disagree. Obviously it is easier to test a scientific theory, but you see my point. But the folks who do read for a living, or dissect lit for a living can provide that context. In short, they have taste. I may not like their tastes, but they have it and it at least points folks in the right direction.
You look silly saying that the person who wrote this needs to work on his language skills:. The cows bellowing and bleeding and stumbling through the mountain meadows with their shovel feet and confusion bawling and floundering through the fences and dragging posts and wires behind.
The ranchers said they brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked in them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order.
Old ceremonies. Old protocols. That book is so full of bad similes That every time I came across one I cringed and dreaded the next one. I am currently searching for a good explanation as to why McCarthy is compared to Faulkner- the only thing I can come up with is his lack of punctuation. Perhaps it is because I am a linguist rather than a literature specialist, but I was always taught to look for the relationship between form and function as a starting point for understanding.
Does anyone know of one? Hi, Rohan. I admire McCarthy a great deal. So, for a couple of years, at least, there was no contemporary voice I enjoyed more.
I do feel a little removed from the context, as he has been silent for some time. What I can still say is that, stylistically, I note the great joy with which McCarthy describes processes. McCarthy is also celebrating practical competency, something central to his books.
More significantly, I admire his desire to try to identify some fundamental social values, to consider how these are betrayed, and — critically — how these values may be reinvented. Craig, what an interesting point about process and practical competency. Would you recommend the Border trilogy as my next step? Even if NCFOM had not been made into a commercially and critically successful film, we could probably all agree that it is his most accessible work.
The mythical elements are reified Chigurh is almost too finely drawn , and there is no allegorical prolegomenon in advance of the paced narrative. But that is not to say that there is anything wrong with All The Pretty Horses as a stand-alone. I like it, but it bears little similarity to the novel. I watched The Road at Dartmouth Crossing, where — in the midst — I got a phone call telling me that I had survived the cut from seven candidates to three for a certain job.
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