Congrats!
Catching up on BBF, they're having a conversation like we had in Natter the other day on grammar/spelling issues. Must be something in the air. But some of the stuff people are griping about - what are these people reading? Is it really that bad? Most but not all of what I read these days I find through various rec sites, so I'm coming at it with at least one layer of filtering, but good lord.
Here's one list of peevs that was posted:
1. Quotation marks (for dialogue) that start but don't close, or close but didn't start.
2. Character names misspelled or not capitalized appropriately.
3. No spacing between paragraphs. Worse still, entire chapters with no demarcation whatsoever, just one long 1500 word paragraph.
4. Wrong pronoun used for character referred to: Spike as a 'her', or Buffy as a 'he'
5. Tense changes within a sentence - 'Buffy walks down the street and decided to cut her hair' kind of thing
6. Starting a chapter or scene and then going back to set the stage with details that either don't matter or should have been incorporated earlier in the beginning. What I mean is that the dialogue and action have gone forward for awhile now, but then the author stops everythingto note that Buffy is wearing a yellow dress with little embroidered green flowers, brown sandals with a three inch heel and dark green pashmina, and left school early that day to visit her mom at the gallery so she was able to get here by four.....and now back to the middle of the argument she was having with Xander....
7. Overuse of adjectives in place of character names. I mean constantly using 'the redhead' or 'the witch' or 'the hacker' or 'the bleached blonde' instead of just saying Willow or Spike. A little of that goes a long way
And there were more, and worse, examples offered up.
Only the first and the last are things I would say I regularly encounter. Am I just lucky?
I would bitch about the tense thing,but it's been a long-term weakness of mine.
1. Quotation marks (for dialogue) that start but don't close, or close but didn't start.
Yeah, this one's annoying and pretty common w/ fanfic; now, SMG has a lovely voice, but having her read the entire narrative of the episode as part of her lines is a bit much.
What irks me is when it's painfully clear that the author has never heard of a) spell-checkers and b) betas.
I'm also pissed off by badly-written stories that have 500 comments, all along the lines of OMG!!! U rock! Rite more!!!!!!!1!!!!!eleventy-one!!!!
Me too. But I'm a bitch, as well as Bitch.
Wear your Bitchdom with pride, erika, both little b and Big B.
edit: damned homonyms.
People tell me my bitter is hot.
I have found, oddly enough, that it is bad punctuation and formatting far more than bad spelling, cheesy characterization, stupid plotting, inane melodrama that get in the way of my reading.
Crap spelling, whatever. I can skim along on context well enough that it is practically invisible. But leave out or misplace a couple of commas, and my reading comprehension nosedives. Without punctuation, I have to stop and parse a sentence, and sometimes double-back to catch its meaning, and the story is effectively lost.
There have been a number of otherwise excellent fanfic writers who (through carelessness, I expect) can't punctuate for shit, or leave their files up in long-line, short-line format, or riddle their work with other visual impediments to skimming. It's a shame -- because I can skim, and slow down when a story turns out to be any good. If I can't skim, then the story has to convince me from the first word that it's good enough not to be skimmed.
it is bad punctuation and formatting far more than bad spelling, cheesy characterization, stupid plotting, inane melodrama that get in the way of my reading.
I agree with this to a large degree. If I see that there are no paragraph breaks (especially for dialogue) or a horizontal scroll bar, I hit the back button. The story could be one of the best ever written, but if the author can't take the trouble to format it so that I can read it without going blind, it's going to stay unread.
