A New Approach to My Videos

How I will stop babbling like an idiot! :)

WRITINGMUTT UPDATEGRAMMAR & STYLE

Ryan A. Wingfield

10/25/20224 min read

Choose your words tiles
Choose your words tiles

Now that I'm getting back into the swing of things with the WritingMutt YouTube channel, there are a few changes that I'd been dying to make.

First, I wanted to overhaul the art assets of the channel, which I'm already in the throes of doing that.

Second, and most importantly, I wanted to change up how I go about the commentary videos.

Up until recently, whenever I uploaded more story content, I'd always upload in batches of 2: one video of the story content without commentary and one video without. They'd be the same exact video, only one of them had me babbling over the duration of the video.

I'd talk about more or less anything that came to mind, which isn't in itself bad, but with how I was presenting the commentary it didn't always come off as very thoughtful or prepared.

Going forward, I've decided to get rid of the commentary videos. In their place, I'm going to upload something more educational. I'm going to use the mistakes and choices made during the writing of The Emerald Knight as an opportunity to teach others lessons on grammar and writing style.

For example, there was a slightly confusing couple of sentences in part 29 of The Emerald Knight:

More arrows, coming from several angles, swarmed the knight and Eranthis as they ran. They dug into the earth and speared the trees.

There is a slight confusion between these two sentences because, in the second sentence, they isn't specific enough as to whom or what it's referring to. Now, one may realize that they is logically referring to arrows from the first sentence, but the confusion comes from the fact that the reader is still thinking about all 3 of the nouns in the first sentence: Eranthis, the knight, and arrows. Because the second sentence begins with they, the reader has to take time to process which of the 3 nouns they is supposed to be. Which takes the reader's attention away from what's happening in the story. Which means they lose their immersion.

Now, we could just change they to "the arrows," but I'd like to explore WHY we should change it. To find out, let's figure out what all these nouns are in a grammatical sense.

To begin with, understand that a complete sentence must contain a subject and a predicate. The subject is always a noun, and the predicate is the part of the sentence that tells us something about the subject.

For example:

Sam eats pizza.

Sam is the subject, and "eats pizza" is the predicate because it's telling us something about Sam.

In another example:

Sam, Mary, and John eat pizza.

Sam, Mary, and John are all subjects of this sentence because "eat pizza" is telling us something about all 3 of them.

A third example:

Sam tells Mary and John about the pizza he ate.

Though this sentence contains Mary and John, Sam is the only subject of this sentence because it is telling us something about Sam, that he tells Mary and John about his pizza. To get more grammatical, Mary and John are objects of this sentence because they are being acted upon by Sam the subject.

Whereas the subject is the actor of the sentence, the object is the acted upon.

Returning to the example from The Emerald Knight:

More arrows, coming from several angles, swarmed the knight and Eranthis as they ran. They dug into the earth and speared the trees.

We can now say that in the first sentence arrows is the subject and the knight and Eranthis are objects—they are being acted upon by the arrows. And, since the subject of the first sentence is arrows, logically it should be determined that they in the second sentence is referring to arrows as well because, since no new subject was introduced, it should be seen as a continuation of information about the arrows. We can logically conclude that, since we get a pronoun in place of a noun from the first sentence or in place of a new noun, we should read the second sentence as continuation of information about the arrows.

But, as stated previously, good storywriters don't want their readers to waste time trying to figure that out. We want them to stay immersed in the story.

Which is why changing they in the second sentence to "the arrows" is necessary.

Going forward, this is the type of content I'd like to produce in addition to story content. They shall be called "companion videos" rather than "commentary videos." I will shoot for 2-3 grammar/style lessons per video each time some story content is released. Though I'll also include some bonus commentary on what it was like to write that part of the story, it'll be much less babble-y.

I think this is a perfect matchup. The story content encourages viewers/readers to check out the grammar & style video, and the grammar & style video encourages viewers/grammarians to check out the story content!

I was actually inspired to make this educational content from another Ryan out there on YouTube. Music composer and teacher Ryan Leach (https://www.youtube.com/c/RyanLeach). He's got some fantastic content about how musical compositions work and on technical concepts to do with compositions. I've been learning a lot from him. Though I'm not a musician per se, I'm learning about music because on top of being fascinating I need to learn it for a rhythm game I'd like to make some day.


If you enjoy the content, subscribe, like, share, and comment! It helps out a lot!

Thank you. :)

R. A. W. 10/28/2022

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