I have noticed small differences in Sanderson's writng style.

[bashef]

Hmm that's interesting - perhaps it is just a few contractions and I've over-generalised. I'm fairly sure Jordan very rarely used them outside of dialogue, and Sanderson definitely does, but that's going to be tricky to prove. Is it possible to get hits for the number of times the apostrophe is used from IdealSeek? I had a little fiddle and I can't seem to get what I'm looking for. My feeling is that the proportion of words which contain a contraction of some sort is significantly higher in Sanderson's work than Jordan's, which could be reasonably approximated as (number of apostrophes) / (word length) - but I'm not sure there's any way to test that!

[batcaver]

I think it's pretty clear that there are distinct differences in the vernacular between the books written by the two authors. The most salient examples to my mind being in the offhand expressions used by the characters or in narration, especially during humorous parts. I'd guess that at least a portion of it is simply due to the generational gap between the two authors, and I doubt that BS does it intentionally; he's just being himself. I do think that RJ was clearly the more meticulous one about maintaining a consistent, universal vernacular in WOT. Not to say he never made mistakes either, but it's just something he paid a lot more attention to. If you're going to make dialect a part of your story( and it's always been a big part of WOT), then I think it's important to be vigilant about it so as not to be constantly breaking your own illusion, so to speak. Characters who live in a variant of a 17th century earth but constantly yammer off twentieth/twenty-first century terms and phrases will obviously become very awkward quickly. Sanderson is very meticulous in other areas, particularly when it comes to how his magic works, his battle sequences, etc. The things you'd expect a fantasy author to be meticulous about, since they're the things that they enjoy the most. I think that he'll grow into the other in time, but we have to remember that RJ had a couple of decades more experience as a writer. It only makes sense that he would be the more nuanced. All in all I think BS is doing a fantastic job. I hope he takes his time with the last book, and puts it out when he's ready.

[meh111287]

The one word that I have found in Sanderson's writings that I never ran across in Jordan's is the word "played", as in "she had been played". Any other stylistic difference I had little trouble overlooking, but this I found incredibly jarring. I came across it twice in ToM. It isn't exactly an anachronism, but I feel like it is out of place. Like being in the middle of a sentence and having a bucket of water dumped on me.

[didymos]

The one word that I have found in Sanderson's writings that I never ran across in Jordan's is the word "played", as in "she had been played". Any other stylistic difference I had little trouble overlooking, but this I found incredibly jarring. I came across it twice in ToM. It isn't exactly an anachronism, but I feel like it is out of place. Like being in the middle of a sentence and having a bucket of water dumped on me.

 

Actually Jordan used it once in tPoD (in a Graendal POV too, no less) in the same fashion:

 

Was she being toyed with, Graendal wondered. The pure hatred for each other on the two women's faces seemed unfeigned. Either way, she would see how they enjoyed being played.

 

There's a close cousin in LoC as well, when Logain says the Reds "played him false".

[didymos]

Hmm that's interesting - perhaps it is just a few contractions and I've over-generalised. I'm fairly sure Jordan very rarely used them outside of dialogue, and Sanderson definitely does, but that's going to be tricky to prove. Is it possible to get hits for the number of times the apostrophe is used from IdealSeek? I had a little fiddle and I can't seem to get what I'm looking for.

 

IdealSeek is really quite limited. It doesn't even allow basic string searches, just whole word matches (which is why you have to search singular and plural separately if you're trying to find all occurrences of, say, a common noun), so you can't search for apostrophes or anything like that. The Kindle for PC reader is good for searching (though not for punctuation. It ignores it), but unless you wanted them for Kindle anyway, it's a little pricey just to get searchable copies.

[Exy]

Hmm that's interesting - perhaps it is just a few contractions and I've over-generalised. I'm fairly sure Jordan very rarely used them outside of dialogue, and Sanderson definitely does, but that's going to be tricky to prove. Is it possible to get hits for the number of times the apostrophe is used from IdealSeek? I had a little fiddle and I can't seem to get what I'm looking for. My feeling is that the proportion of words which contain a contraction of some sort is significantly higher in Sanderson's work than Jordan's, which could be reasonably approximated as (number of apostrophes) / (word length) - but I'm not sure there's any way to test that!

I kind of doubt this it's true that Jordan didn't use contractions in description. I just started rereading the first book, and I've found it jarring in a couple spots when he didn't use contractions when he could have.

 

Contractions are WAY more common than the alternative in normal English. Not using a contraction when you can makes your speech sound stilted or extremely formal. I think if he was generally avoiding them in text the tone of the writing would have ended up feeling a lot more archaic than it does. It really sticks out in the first part of TEotW (in which, as I think is common knowledge, Jordan was deliberately trying to emulate Tolkien's style.)

[bashef]

The use of contractions isn't a question of whether the writing is archaic in style per se - it denotes register, and not using contractions shifts the register towards formality. That's not really a good or bad thing by itself, it's just a question of the tone one wishes to convey. For example, I'm an academic - academic articles in journals do not feature contractions, at all, and if the submitted text contains them they will almost certainly be edited out. You shouldn't use them in formal letters either. However, most other writing I do (email, forums, whatever) will contain them - it makes the writing seem more conversational, relaxed and intimate. Whether that's appropriate or not is something an author will usually make a conscious choice about.

 

Spoken language on the other hand overwhelmingly uses contractions - hence my suspicion about the dialogue being different to the rest of the prose. I may be wrong, it may just be the contraction of the model verb "have" I'd noticed which I over-generalised to include all contractions. Unfortunately, as I think we established, without access to the raw plain text that's an assertion that's difficult to validate.

[Exy]

The use of contractions isn't a question of whether the writing is archaic in style per se - it denotes register, and not using contractions shifts the register towards formality.

Right, but "formal register" and "archaic" are two closely related phenomena. Formal registers are always more conservative. Look at how people (at least if they're not fairly well-educated in the history of English) use "thou" as though it were associated with formality.

 

At any rate, it's understating things to say that the failure to use contractions is just "formal". Overwhelming evidence suggests that not using contractions is highly, highly marked. Academic papers, and maybe very formal speeches, but it's really noticeable, and odd-sounding, where Jordan failed to use them during the part of tEOtW in which he was imitating Tolkein.

[l_uniquefeuille]

RJ's language was more subtle like in classics:

For example, pregnancy.

I think the word"pregnancy or pregnant" was not used before tGS.

It was more like "with child" like in books like "Anne of Green Gables."

[didymos]

RJ's language was more subtle like in classics:

For example, pregnancy.

I think the word"pregnancy or pregnant" was not used before tGS.

It was more like "with child" like in books like "Anne of Green Gables."

 

Nope. "Pregnant" first appeared in LoC. "Pregnancy" too. Also, there's nothing more "subtle" about "with child" anyway. It's simply another way of saying "pregnant" (which has been used in English since at least the 1400s, and that's just going by the earliest print citations from the OED. It's almost certainly been part of English since shortly after the Norman conquest), only using words derived from Anglo-Saxon instead of Latin (by way of Old French). There's no question about what it's referring to.

[Guest dgduhon]

The one thing I've noticed most between RJ and BS is the words 'bosomy' and 'knuckled'. BS doesn't seem to use those words as much as RJ, but I could be wrong.

[OptimusPrime]

About three quarters of TGS is spent on Brandon overeusing the word "tempest."

[Shard]

About three quarters of TGS is spent on Brandon overeusing the word "tempest."

 

I didn't even notice it once, must not have been as often as some think.

[magnutz]

Brandon also name drops like a mad-man. The text is a mess of names and he repeates them over and over too. I am not happy about his last installment...

[EvilSocrates]

I'd just like to mention that didymos is awesome. Huzzah testing intuitions with facts! Thanks for the legwork.

[Jon Paul]

This thread has shaken my faith in humanity.

[AuldGoldBeard]

From a sheer diction viewpoint, RJ used the word "such" far, far more often than Sanderson did.

 

Apart from that, I think it's very easy to tell the difference between the two writers, although it's tough to put into words. RJ is just head and shoulders better than Sanderson with his prose (pacing is a different matter). I write a lot, and so I did pick out a few of Sanderson's habits I dislike after I read KoD and TGS back-to-back.

 

1. Massive blocks of text doing nothing but describing the character's internal thoughts. Absolutely drives me crazy; Perrin is the worst offender.

 

2. Repetition of adjectives in dialogue. For example, when the compelled kid is brought to Rand, he asks something to the effect of, "Why have you brought me this spindly, terrified youth?" The kid's already been described as spindly, it's pretty damn obvious he'd be terrified, and even if the text hadn't remotely alluded to either of those characteristics before, nobody would ever describe him that way since Nynaeve is standing right there and can see damn well for herself that he's spindly and terrified.

 

3. "Impact" paragraphs. Not sure what else to call this, but an example runs something like this.

"Blah blah, assuming Egwene would be a good Amyrlin. *paragraph break*

It was a good assumption. *paragraph break*

Blah blah blah."

Jordan did that on rare occasions, but rarely in such a cheesy and melodramatic manner.

 

4. Too many questions, particularly rhetorical questions, in internal dialogue. They simply make the characters look whiny and indecisive.

 

 

In his defense, I will say that a number of those problems were significantly better in ToM than they were in TGS.

[magnutz]

Sanderson is not my favorite author. He is not doing a great job with the "finishing up" project. There are so many differences between RJ's way of expressing stuff and Sanderson's that I find it hard to go on reading the story. I can't stand the way he litters, absolutely and utterly litters each page with character names and place names. Does he think the readers are stupid?! It a chapter centers around - Perrin for instance - the reader knows this and also knows Perrin by way of familiarity. We recognize him from the way he thinks and speaks. Slow and deliberate. His name needs only to be repeated once or twice on any given page. This is no small difference.

 

Disappointment major.

[Metal Sheets]

When I first read TGS I was shocked at how different it was from RJ's books. I actually started skimming through it just to get past all the drek. There were so many things that were just off that I couldn't place a finger on most. The one thing that was major major major, and it's been addressed in other threads, was Mat's phrasing. It seemed like an entirely different character. Almost nothing lined up with how he had been previously. That is an opinion though, and I don't have any readily available proof. TOM was slightly better, although I hated the discussion about boots. The whole "So you're using the boots as a metaphor blah blah blah" made me want to burn down a school so nobody could be taught to read this nonsense. That being said I applaud him for even attempting to undertake such a monumental task. The thought of writing the final books in arguably the most epic series in print is crazy. There is no way to get the subtle details of the characters like thought correct, so after reading and re-reading I decided to forgive Mr. Sanderson his trespasses. After 20 years with these people in his head RJ was basically writing about his imaginary friends, who could possibly get inside another person's head and accurately recreate something that personal? So in conclusion, I like his story telling but...

[Myrenna]

Someone said earlier about Sanderson saying "burn it" a lot and this really jarred with me. It felt like he was using "burn" as an alternative to the-F-word, which wasn't how Jordan used it, and at times it seems very strange! Other than that I don't like some of the "modern" sounding words -- I know we have early examples of these words, but they still do sound too modern and colloquial. His use of "random" sometimes sounds to me like the way a teenager speaking to his friends might use it. Other than those small discrepancies, I really enjoy the way he's written WoT!

[Hopefire]

"All right" is one that I noticed in TOM, and which made me twitch a bit. I don't know if Jordon has used it at all, but it didn't sound quite in-setting.

[A. Pseudonym]

I cannot understand this fixation on particular words being used. It is largely irrelevant given that the issue here is the quality of the authors, namely their capacity to immerse the reader in a fantasy world of their own devising.

 

Sanderson fails because he is a mediocre writer assembling the notes of another person into novel format. When he begins he's already at a distance from his material. His struggles to close that distance, such as turning Mat and Talmanes into clowns in TGS, just shows up his shallow understanding of the source material and inability to continue what Jordan started.

 

I have said this before, but an author brings themselves and only themselves to their work. Sanderson writes American stereotypes and American points of view in a fantasy setting. He could do it in a sci-fi or period setting and the differences would be superficial. That is the extent of his abilities. Jordan had the ability to immerse the reader in the point of view of a character from an alien culture in another world to the extent that one sees the world as they saw it, shares their reaction to it and believes their interpretations of it. The reader is Rand. The reader is Elayne. Or whatever. For this reason I never disliked, became annoyed by or resented any character's behaviour because it was presented in such a way as to be sympathetic and understandable. To the point that I could see myself in their place. With Sanderson, you're given patronising exposition declaring that X is so because Y.

It's this sort of primitive approach that I resent as it implies not only an inability to sell a perspective or a reaction but is a dumbing-down of what once was a very deep and moving story.

 

I will read these 3 books because I want to see how it ends. Not and never for Sanderson. I am not a fan.

[Ihasavowel]

I cannot understand this fixation on particular words being used. It is largely irrelevant given that the issue here is the quality of the authors, namely their capacity to immerse the reader in a fantasy world of their own devising.

 

 

For some readers, the particular words used are not irrelevant to their sense of immersion.