Okay, I can't get a sentence to work. Should be a simple one for you, but every way I try it, it looks wrong. As it turned out, they didn’t have a head start, so much as that the race had pretty much been run by now. The problem is with "so much as". I can't figure out if it's in the right spot, if it should be "as much as" or "so much so" or, at this point, a sentence like this even exists. Extra clarification: The boss and her assistant have been waiting to go to a going away party, so that the employees could get a little head start with the drinks without being tense about the boss being around. The above sentence should start the next scene.
I think the problem is that the form is different before "so much as" and after it. In the first part of the sentence you're referring to 'what they have', but with a negative added, so the second half should repeat the form and tell us what they did have, and it should begin with an 'a', just as 'a head start' did. But you switched form and instead told us something about the race (that it had already been won). The subject needs to still be 'they', as it was for the first part of the sentence. To make it work properly you could say As it turned out, they didn’t have a head start so much as a __________ (fill in blank). Or if you want to use the 2 phrases you already have, you need to switch the position of the 'so much as'. You could say It wasn't that they had a head start so much as that the race had already been run. That way the second half duplicates the form of the first. But I'm a little bothered by the repetitive 'that', and don't know a simple way to fix it.
If I put myself in the headspace of the best editor I've worked with, I think she'd say to make it more straightforward by removing the "so much as that" entirely: As it turned out, they didn’t have a head start - the race had pretty much been run by now. She would also probably say to remove the "pretty much" as well, but I have a few of those in my books that I decided not to remove, because I felt like they fit with the character's voice and my own conversational writing style.
@Laurin Kelly you win the internet! Your solution is what I was wobbling my way toward and would have found eventually.
That's okay, you've helped quite well already. At least now I have some grasp of how to use it properly, should I choose to try it again. I did put a placeholder in that fixed the issue kinda like @Laurin Kelly suggested, and to be honest, I think I'm keeping that. Looks less... wrong. Laurin, if you don't mind; you used a hyphen between the two parts of the sentence. Why, or when, does that happen? I would have blindly gone for a comma.
Yeah, the em-dash (long dash), used without spaces before or after, is used when the second part (everything after the dash) refers back to the first half—expands on it or elaborates on it somehow (see what I did there? ) As for how to make one, I had to ask some time ago and there's some good info posted on that thread (about different kinds of keyboards etc, it's different on a PC or a Mac): How do you type an M-Dash on this message board? SOLVED It's called an em-dash because it's as wide as the letter M, and the short dash is an en-dash, it's half as wide.
Thank you so much for explaining this! My grasp of grammar is almost entirely based on observation, both from reading other people's books and by seeing the changes editors have made to my own. I can sense what to do most of the time, but I'm really bad at explaining why.
If you haven't seen it, I added some more info to that post since you responded to it. Actually, I can't tell if you responded before I added the rest, or if you just deleted the irrelevant parts.
Yep - I'm used to typing [space] [dash] [space] and then Word automatically corrects it to an em-dash
You were all here, remember this thread. It marks the first time an em-dash will be put in my story. And that's exactly what I do. Except I don't read nearly enough to mimic actual writing properly. Good, alt codes. I love 'em. (Or, I love —) A long time ago I did an essay on the heavy metal umlaut, so I've got all the umlaut-vowel codes wedged into my head. I'll need to drop one to make room for the em-dash. Guess I'm not really using ÿ. Ironic trivia: There are no umlauts in umlaut.
I'm a recovering em-dash addict. Actually not sure recovering is the right term, but headed that way. I try to get the addiction out of my system here on the board so I'm not so tempted to use them in my writing, but they still find their way in too much.
Yeah, I'm finding out what you're saying here as we speak. I just put another one in, which reminded me to come here and check on the thread. I can't go a sentence without thinking, "Is this bit referring back to the other bit?" Fortunately, so far, the only editing being done is by my girlfriend, who reads a lot, but doesn't necessarily understand the mechanics of those arcane symbols you mentioned much better than I do. Often enough, she goes, "The hell is this?" And my go-to answer is now, "Yeah, no, forum says it's like that. Live with it." Soon as I get over the novelty of this em-dash discovery, I'm gonna look into ellipses—sounds like something I could have some good fun with.
