Drop the Gerund, Son!

Un-overuse this verb tense.

Photo by Dell on Unsplash; robot by me

gonna begin and end this post by reminding you of something you’ve surely already heard, but it always bears repeating:

READ YOUR WORK OUT LOUD!!!

Writing is a sonic art, even when that sound is only happening in our heads. It still matters. The rhythm of things matters. The way we use and avoid repetition matters. As writers, our craft roots are in the spoken word, not MS Word. Don’t forget it.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way:

There’s been a lot of chatter about what gives genAI writing that awkward, irritating sound, and yeah, passive voice and excessive descriptors are two prime examples. I haven’t really clocked the em-dash thing and I personally love em-dashes, but that’s an argument for another time. What we’re here today to talk about is another, lesser-known overused verb tense in writing both artificially generated and not, and that’s the gerund.

The gerund, for those who don’t know, is the —ing form of a verb. As with all Beware The Dreaded ____ type writing advice, this isn’t about avoiding gerunds altogether — (em dash!! yarrr) as you can see, I just used two in that sentence, and I’m about to use another. It’s about having an awareness of them and what they do and how they jank up your flow.

One reason to be particularly wary is exactly what just happened in the above paragraph: they are ubiquitous, bro! You couldn’t get away from them even if you tried. That’s why no one is telling you not to use them, ever. What I’m saying here is, if you don’t have an ear out for them, they’ll cause you problems.

inginginging sounds like a mosquito’s alarm clock

The first major reason is that it starts to tickle the ear weirdly when that ing sound keeps blaring out over and over. Make the noise on its own right now. Do it. Even if you’re in public? No? Too weird? Exactly. You sound like a weirdo going “ing, ing, ing” over and over, and it’s not just because there’s no word attached. It’s an automatically grating, nasal, off pitch hum. It’s almost like the infamous tritone of musical lore, which was so weirdly off-putting in its dissonance that the old church bros decided it had to be OF THE DEVIL. The tritone, like the gerund, is also a key part of most great music, so the lesson remains: Use it wisely.

Parallel Sentence Structure

One of the most common mis/overuses of the gerund happens in parallel sentence structures, which I know they warned us all about in high school but none of us paid attention and here we are. Professional writers do this all the time and that doesn’t make it right! It makes it even more grating when you hear it out loud, yarrrr!! Plus they’re getting paid for it, ugh!

The problem with parallel sentence structure isn’t that it’s breaking some archaic grammar rule of expository writing class or whatever. Nobody cares. The problem is it sounds robotic and clunky. Gerunds are often at the heart of that parallel structure.

Here’s an example:

Bill yelled, jumping forward into the crowd of penguins. The penguins stepped to one side, avoiding Bill’s falling body.

Please note that these can get by you so easily because they can hide behind uneven participles and appear like different types of sentences. In this example, the words “to one side” make it a little less obvious than if that participle had started with the same two letter structure as the first sentence’s opener.

Read this aloud:

Bill yelled, jumping forward into the crowd of penguins. The penguins dodged, avoiding Bill’s falling body.

It’s more obvious that there’s a tonal repetition happening, right? But both versions are parallel structures and both ultimately sound off.

In both versions, something happened, and it was happening, another thing was happening. And then the exact same rhythm of events happens again. It feels like a glitch. The ear rejects it, even if only ever so slightly.

Note also that throwing a sentence in between them isn’t necessarily gonna throw off the weird jangle of it.

Repetition is not inherently bad, of course. But like gerunds and tritones and the Force, we must wield it with intentionality.

Time Gets Slippery

Which brings us to meaning. Used recklessly, the gerund slows time down to a crawl. It sucks the urgency and immediacy out of sentence. It envaguens the chronology, (yes I made that word up but you knew what it meant so who gives a fuck, what word wasn’t made up??) Even if this one urgent thing happened during the course of other things happening, as in the examples above, there’s still a molasses effect that you want to use sparingly, with purpose, and almost definitely not twice in a row.

in closing…

you wouldn’t have to worry about any of this shit if you would just do one simple thing actually and you already know what that is:

Thank you!

Tell me what random grammar glitches make you yell like an irritated robot!