Last Friday, in English class, we discussed how to better our writing. My teacher instructed us that nouns and verbs should do 90% of the work while writing, and the other 10% is all the other types of words, including prepositions, adverbs, adjectives, and articles. That's a big difference. He said one way to keep that percentage rate is to cut out all the "to be" verbs, in what ever tense. Words like "is," "am," "are," "was," "were," especially when the word following ends in -ing (that's the past continuous tense, a horribly ungrammatical tense in writing). Many times, an excess of these verbs leads to your character passively being acted upon, instead of your character actively acting. He said that if your writing ever seems to drag, it may be because of an overbearing presence of these verbs. That prompted me to analyze my story MtH, for I find it dragging and boring in many areas, and I'm the author! I searched for "was" and found over 300 occurances, so over the past few days, I started the process of slowly editing my work and lessening my "to be" verbs. It is a challenge, but an extremly gratifying one. I find myself on page 12 with 270 occurances of the dreaded word, and still more to eliminate. Perhaps my writing skil will increase through this exercise. Other words to avoid include "would," "could," and "should," although we did not do any excersizes related to deleting these words from our writing vocabulary.
Now, another challenge presents itself. In French class, we study various verb tenses. This past week, we learned the imperfect and the conditional tenses. Imperfect means "was doing" and conditional is "would." This makes me wonder, is there such thing as Proper French, and if so, what are the rules and do to the imperfect and conditional tenses count as improper. If so, why are we learning them? Why are we learning them in the first place, if, when we translate, we should be translating into Proper English? Until I answer these questions, however, I will continue to study hard these tenses to increase my French knowlege. Also, learning these tenses makes translating songs fun, like "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof. That song fits perfectly with these new tenses. Also, the line from Peter Pan (with Jeremy Sumpter and Jason Isaacs) "If I were you, I'd give up." "If you were me, I'd be ugly." translate more easily now. Learning French, although confusing, makes me happy.
