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.

The filling-in-details-in-the-middle thing annoys me too. You generally only get it in stuff that emphatically didn't have a beta, since it's clearly stuff where the author went, "Oh right, I should have said this earlier." So if she/he or someone else were to go back over it even once, they could have moved it.

Or, sometimes they just don't care. But it's very much like someone telling a joke -- "Oh, and I forgot to tell you she had a poodle with her..."

I recently read a story with very strange syntax. I'd say it was someone imposing the syntax of their native language on their imperfect English, except that I learned from my Human Development teacher that only one group uses Verb-Object-Subject, and that group consists entirely of Yoda.

Together are Seth and Ryan fated to be, hmmm?

Catching up on BBF, they're having a conversation like we had in Natter the other day on grammar/spelling issues

WHY did they have to have this conversation while I was gone? Trying to find actual recs in the NINE MILLION STUPID NITPICKY AND OFTEN INCORRECT POSTS ABOUT GRAMMAR is driving me a little bonkers.

WHY did they have to have this conversation while I was gone? Trying to find actual recs in the NINE MILLION STUPID NITPICKY AND OFTEN INCORRECT POSTS ABOUT GRAMMAR is driving me a little bonkers.

There were like, three. You want I should track 'em down for you?

And the curriculum for CA schools, which is pretty much irrelevant. Although, I bookmarked some excellent sites for reference when writing, so it wasn't a total waste (not waist.)

Nah, I'm through most of the posts. It's just funny that I've been in fandom so long (it seems) that arguments about nitpicks irritate me more than the actual nitpicks.