Glistening with

[Bassim]

Would you take a look at the following sentences and correct my mistakes?

The beach was crowded. Bodies of all ages, sizes and shapes lay lazily under the scorching sun, glistening with sweat and sun cream.

 

[GoesStation]

It's grammatically correct and natural. Mark Twain famously said "If you catch an adverb, kill it" -- but you didn't ask about style.

 

[Bassim]

GoesStation

I am using adverbs and adjectives more than I should probably out of habit. In my mother tongue, adjectives and adverbs are used more often than in English. I have noticed that when people from Slavic languages try to translate fiction to English, the texts seems often teeming with adjectives and adverbs, which make them heavy to read. In original texts, probably nobody would complain about them. English seems not to tolerate so many adjectives or adverbs in one sentence.

 

[GoesStation]

Styles change. I've read a couple of Alan Hunter's Gently series of detective novels recently. At least in his early days, Hunter did not heed Twain's admonition; contrarily, he used adverbs prodigiously and often inventedly. (He invented a lot of them, a style I imitated with that last word. Please don't use it.)

 

[Tarheel]

Perhaps:

The beach was crowded. People of all ages, sizes and shapes lay lazily under the scorching sun, glistening with sweat and sun screen.

 

[Bassim]

Tarheel,
In my version, the accent is on the bodies and in your on the people. I prefer my version because we are on the beach, and bodies are everywhere, and it is hot....

 

[emsr2d2]

Those bodies belong to the people. I can't really see any way of differentiating between them. Don't forget that "bodies" can mean "corpses". Admittedly, your context makes that confusion unlikely but if you said, for example, "Bodies lay all over the beach", readers might come to a somewhat different conclusion.

 

[Skrej]

I think the potential ambiguity works well here. It is almost as if the bodies were slabs of meat slathered in a basting sauce, roasting in the heat.

 

[emsr2d2]

I think the potential ambiguity works well here. It is almost as if the bodies were slabs of meat slathered in a basting sauce, roasting in the heat.

Sounds like package holidays to Spain in the 1970s! ;-)