You're changing tense in the wrong way, at least in the first sentence, which is why it is difficult to understand. If I were to try to re-word it, it would phrase it this way: Due to my desire for friendship with Eli vanishing away long ago, there is no reason that you and I should not be friends again, as our friendship was broken only due to my steadfast focus on Eli. I no longer desire to be friends with her, and I am now content that she has forgiven me. If you permit me to enquire, where exactly is this sentence going - as it jumps around a lot - and I am pondering on what you are describing. Is this dialogue or an introduction to a story?
At least it is clear. To me that indicates some kind of progress. Even though the sentence is a mess, it nonetheless is clear. When you say grammatically ugly, do you mean that the grammar is incorrect or that it is unpleasant or both?
First, I think the sentence should begin with an Adress. Who is the speaker speaking to? Second, I believe the above should be two sentences. You have two ideas going through this: first, the speaker and audience should be friends, and second, that Eli has forgiven the speaker and he or she is happy with this outcome.
I struggled to get through it (I am very tired). If it doesn't get cut into more sentences, I hope the rest is as wordy. What I think of when reading it is a spoken introduction to a game/movie/series.
No. It’s too much. This is what I see: <Cause>, <Result>, <Reason>, <Appositive of Reason>, <Emphasis of Cause>, <Reason>, <Result> You can make long sentences work, but they have to branch in one direction. When the sentence points back at what came before and then moves forward again, it all gets knotted. You want the details to cascade in one direction, like a camera swooping over the scene. You don’t want it to do snapshots across the scene. The same with prose. Whether its physical or emotional, it needs to move toward conclusion. So I would break this one apart. I’m assuming your time period has no conjunctions. It's very haut ton. I have to deal with those too. (The trick is to relax the narration. That’s an aside though . . .) Eli and I are through. You and I can be friends. She was stopping us. I thought of her too much. I don’t want her any more. She’s forgiven me. I’m glad. Then what I would do is look for ideas that are repetitions. I highlighted the ones that can be combined. The last two can be put together too as quick cause/result. I'm re-sorting it just a touch too for progression. It starts at Eli, moves to Eli and MC, then to YOU and MC. And that progression has a metaphorical meaning, so I feel it's a good one. Eli and I are through. I’m glad she’s forgiven me. When I thought of her, it ruined us. But now you and I can be friends. Then you take those dry ideas and roll them back into your voice, probably with a touch of image and a lot of emotion and verbs that have punch. Not necessarily four sentences, two would work. Edit: I assumed Eli was female. I guess it could be a guy. Sorry. Just make the adjustment.
I would say that it's primarily unpleasant--it's very awkward and choppy to read. The rewrite is somewhat less unpleasant than the original. It's "clear" in the sense that the reader will have a fairly confident idea of what you mean, after the second or possibly the third reading. However, the requirement for a second or third meaning means that all flow will be lost.
What do you mean by choppy? Is there too frequent punctuation? And how do you define pleasant and unpleasant in regard to sentences? Also, how do you define awkward?
The revision is better but its still got extraneous words and repetition, and an odd use of 'for' "It is time for our friendship to dawn again. It died from my steadfast focus on Eli, but it should live once more, for I have let her go, content that she has forgiven me."
There are too many clauses--there's absolutely no reason why this should all be one sentence. There's nothing about those several clauses that means that they benefit from being taped together. You have the possibility of echoes here and an excuse to tie some things together--friendship with Eli, friendship with the person being addressed, loss of friendship with both, forgiveness from Eli, perhaps a request for forgiveness from the person being addressed. That might possibly be fodder for some contrasting or echoing phrases. But you're not doing that. You're so focused on the sound and the rhythm that you're ignoring the meaning, and it's the meaning that can support the sound and the rhythm. You can't ignore meaning. You just can't. Do you think that the writers of the King James translation said, "Eh, who really cares what the Bible means? We want to make it sound pretty." ? Do you think that they would have been just as happy to be translating any book at all? Or do you think that they cared deeply about the meaning and used the music of the words to serve the meaning, rather than the other way around? In your sample, the reader is going to be irritated and going to wait (and wait. and wait. and wait. and wait.) for the sentence to be done. Then they'll have to go back and read it again, and probably a third time. And there's nothing pleasing about the clause after clause after clause trudge through the sentence--it is indeed a laborious trudge. Each combination of words seems to be deliberately flipped to make comprehension more difficult and to make the phrases more unpleasant. "no more do I even desire" could be "I no longer want" or "I no longer wish" but that is apparently too simple and graceful; the grace must be systematically stripped out of it. "Has vanished" is a perfectly clear and sufficiently graceful phrase, but that grace must be removed by adding "...away long ago" If you want to study the way that the King James Bible works, study it. Have you read any literary criticism that actually analyzes what it does?
Or have you thought about joining a monastery or seminary? Or enrolling in a divinity program? You might find a more like minded group of individuals there instead of a bunch of writers with a more, uh, secular attitude toward the craft in most cases...
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the meaning is important. Unfortunately, I feel like my options are limited when the sentence must be a short as possible, and when they must conform to only one kind of word order. I have not found any such criticism of the King James Bible. It appears that no one has investigated the subject. I am still wondering if the English language was divinely preconfigured to give the Bible its cadence. But I don't really think that God would do it that way. Of course, before creating the material universe, he must have set the laws of nature, so it is not altogether impossible that before having His word translated, He set the nature of language so that only the Bible could have a certain cadence. But I don't really think He did that.
These conversations would go a lot better if you avoided the passive-aggressive misinterpretations of what people are saying. Who--and please quote the exact words in the exact post--demanded that sentences be "as short as possible"? Who? Alternatively, you could admit that you are willfully misinterpreting "too long" and "too many clauses" to mean "as short as possible". Oh, yes, and "must conform to only one kind of word order". Again, please offer the exact words in the exact post that said that, or admit to your choice to misinterpret the advice that, I point out one more time, you keep asking for. Did you look? How many librarians did you consult? Or maybe just Google? A quick search on "literary commentary" "king james bible" turns up a lot of stuff. Yes, you might need to go to a library to get your hands on some of it, but that's a far cry from saying that it doesn't exist. Plenty of people seem to have investigated the subject. You understand that the Bible was not written in English, and it does not solely exist in English, right? A quick Google tells me that the Bible has been translated into 469 languages. And, again, the people who did the King James translation cared about meaning. Why not try doing the same?
The various bible stories would have been originally written down in either Aramaic or Hebrew, after being passed by word of mouth for quite some time before the gospels were actually recorded in writing (since most people at the time were illiterate) After that they would have been translated into old Latin around the time that the Roman Empire converted to Christianity in AD312. After that Latin was the official language of the church for over a thousand years with the first old English bible translation being started by by the venerable bede in 712AD and another by Aldhelm arround the same time. It wasnt until the 14th century that John Wycliffe translated the whole bible into middle english. The first printed copy in 'modern english was produced by Tyndale in 1526 with the first roman catholic bible in english being the Douhay - Rhiems bible published in 1582. The first king james bible was written and produced in 1611 So in short no the English language was not divinely preconfigured for cadence since it was not the language in which the scripture was originally recorded. Was divine preconfiguration on the cards Latin would have been the divine choice
Obtaining meaning, sound, and Rhythm in a simple sentence is very easy. My example: 'The city littered up the night with light." We have in the above 1. A clear meaning. 2. An image. 3. Written in Iambic Pentameter. 4. A subtextual meaning hinted at with the Connotation of 'litter.' 5. We have four -yes four- musical devices (Internal Rhyme, Consonance, Alliteration, and Assonance) 6. And all of this is accomplished in a simple sentence made up of eight words.
