The Writers' Group
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Greetings everybody,
especially those new among you, waiting to make a mark in the world of pony fiction!
Such an act surely requires many things: proper cover art, interesting and believable characters, solid plot, spotless grammar... and a huge chunk of luck. But I'm not here to tell you that. Countless guides concerning these issues can be found all around the site, after all. (If you don’t like a little lengtly beginnings, head straight for the last paragraph. You might miss some context, but the advice shall still come off clear.)
Many of these steps to a good story aren't as 'problematic' as they may seem. Plot and characters are limited only by your imagination. Quality of cover art depends on your skill or on the amount of money you are willing to spend on it.
However, grammar can be tricky. For no matter how many times we look, there are always a few errors escaping our eyes. We are simply blind to our own mistakes. Of course, with each bit of experience and feedback you receive, your proofreading ability gets better, but never top notch pristine. Heck, even the proteins checking our DNA make mistakes from time to time, resulting in mutations. That's why there are many of these proteins, checking the same spots their 'colleagues' worked on. And just like those proteins, you should look for another pair of helping eyes, an editor (If they have just one eye, it's sufficient as well. If they have more than a pair, the better!
) It could be any person with proper knowledge of the English language. They'll help you comb through the story for errors or things that may come off unclear.
Still, when new users come to the site, they usually don't know many people here. Getting an editor might be really hard for the first time. However, the story should still get a proper grammar check up. Typos and nonexistent words can be detected by any spellchecking software. Grammar errors, on the other hand, tend to slip through these.
I have spent countless hours reading stories that I randomly found around the site, usually those with next to none views and also those seeking advice. In that time, I assembled a list of the most common grammar issues. Many of them can be quickly dealt with if you know the correct forms and/or can use Ctrl+F. This method can be used if you want to make sure you don't have the basic errors there and publish right away. Furthermore, it's a great way of making the job easier for your editor. Finally I'm getting to the point of this post. So, those of you who fell asleep should wake up again
Here is the list of the most common issues, along with explanation of how should these be used. If you are a novice writer, I recommend you pay close attention to what is said below.
its/it’s
its – belonging to it
it’s – a shortened form of 'it is'
your/you’re
your – belonging to you
you're – a shortened form of 'you are'
"Why, thank you! Anything for the people behind the fourth wall!"
his/he’s
his – belonging to a male character
he's – a shortened form of 'he is'
Twilights/Twilight’s/Twilights‘
Twilights – a plural form (Written without apostrophe!)
Twilight's – belonging to one Twilight
on/one
on - referring to a location, also a part of phrasal verbs
one - referring to the amount
now/know/no
now - referring to time, at the moment
know - to have some information stored in your brain
no - a word of disagreement
there/their/they’re
there - referring to a location
their - belonging to them
they're - a shortened form of 'they are'
to/too/two
to - a word signaling direction, also a loyal company of verbs
too - referring to 'amount' or marking agreement
two - referring to the number 2
then/than
then - signaling something happening later
Rainbow is stronger than Fluttershy.
I
Remember that 'I', the word you use when referring to yourself, is always capitalized, even in the middle of the sentence.
Names
Remember to always check if all the character and city names are capitalized. (No twilight from canterlot!) If you are using uppercase letters for some items, make sure to keep it consistent. That means, no switching between the forms of 'Element of Honesty' and 'element of laughter'.
Numerals
Numerals are the symbols you usually use to write numbers, such as 0, 1, 42. However, the trouble with them is that they look differently than normal letters, thus they subconsciously attract the reader's attention. But you don't want the reader to look at some numbers, you want them to pay full attention to the plot! That's why you should write numbers using words, not numerals. Just like here:
Exceptions to this rule are years (It happened in 1621.) and some codes and names (DJ Pon3).
Ellipsis
Ellipsis refers to a word being left out of the sentence, or a speaker trailing off. It is marked by three dots (...) No more, no less!
Phew... and that's all. Any additional questions? Anything unclear? If any of the senior writers have made it this far and have some bits of grammar experience to share, I'll be glad if they do!
Until next time
-Ever
The biggest problem with proofreading for yourself is that your eyes tend to, quite naturally, slide over your own mistakes. It's really quite understandable - after all, if you didn't think you were writing it right, you would've written it differently, excepting typos and such. Editors don't exist because the average writer is incompetent or not capable of proofreading their own work. It's because we have an intrinsic blind spot for our own flaws.
You should always proofread your own stories. Read them once, twice, or even three times. Don't assume that you don't need an editor just because you've done that, though. You still do. There's no story that won't be improved by having a third or fourth opinion comment on it. Period.
6106647
Very true, but i think this list isn't meant to say that editors aren't needed, it's a help for new members who struggle to find one.
6106663
Certainly. I just wanted to make this clear, so there are no misunderstandings. This is good advice that everyone can benefit from, but it doesn't replace the need for a proper editor.
6106641
The it's/its and there/their/they're mistakes are my most common ones. It's been that way my entire life, drives me mad I tell you. At least I'm better off than the poor and highly successful writers who can't complete the words "and" or "can".
That means you Steven King.
Glen Gorewood
6106663
Indeed, that was what I intended. It was meant as a sort of starting point for those forced to work without an editor. The problem here is that I can't write a post the length of a novel, because I believe that would scare any beginner off. That also means far less space for foolproof explanations, so something may come off a little ambiguous.
6106641
Only you could come up with a bio example for descripe the editor job
Anyway intresting post
6106678
It's certainly a great quick reference and I recommend that everyone bookmark it who is even a little bit unsure about matters of spelling or grammar. Have this kind of thing open when you're writing, together with a dictionary for making sure words actually mean what you intend to say with them, and you will have already taken care of some of the most common mistakes people on this site tend to make.
6106647
Yep, too much familiarity. Reading out loud helps a lot, as it forces you to pay attention (even better: read out loud, but read out of order). Leaving the text for a few days also helps.
Nothing quite beats another pair of eyes, though.
6106673
No, it doesn't, and it's not supposed to.
Good thing you clarified it though, uncertainty can easily make beginner's get off track.
6106678
I think it came out just fine
6106674
I often mess up on know/now just because of fast typing. But because I know that happens a lot, it's the first thing I check while proofreading the story. Though indeed, it's annoying.
6106687
The proteins (polymerases) are said to have a 'proofreading ability'. I couldn't resist that
6106698
I type one handed and fast, so I think part of my problem is related to that. But as long as you try to self correct, that's better than letting the errors go. That's how I view it at least.
Glen Gorewood
6106698
I have a bit of a g/k weakness myself. Putting 'thing' where there should be 'think,' things like that. I usually notice it on the second pass, but it still happens. Comes from my native accent, I think. "Wot are ya thinging" is pretty much how I actually talk.
6106711
Yeah, already experienced that one a few times too. Though come to think of it, I haven't encountered this mistake in any story, at least not one I can recall
Do I do any of those wrong?
6106713
It's probably one of those things that comes from being trilingually German. Where I come from, we tend to round our k's like that. Native English speakers typically pronounce the K sharper and the G softer on the whole, if they don't drop the G altogether at the end of words. It's interesting how our "inner monologue" can flow into our writing like that.
6106719
My mother tongue is Czech, a Slavic language. Our G and K at the end of the word sound all the same to me as well.
6106715
I believe you should know that best yourself. I'm not sure if I hadn't caught some lowercase i in your stories, but I can't really remember to be honest.
6106728
well, I would have said no, so I thought it would be a good time to destroy some of those illusions
Lowercase i does sound like the most likely to miss.
6106641
So true and I definitely do hate grammatical errors that can't be tracked by spellchecker. I usually do like to look at lists like the one you made now so I could be sure.
Though one thing that I know I always mix up is the use of articles a, an, the or /none/.
6106774
Just don't trust spellchecker in everything. The GDoc one can sometimes mark things that are perfectly correct
6106783
Oh I don't trust GDoc spellchecker. And still spelling is an issue that can be noticed after few readings. There are grammar errors that are harder to notice and even worse if you are not native English speaker and by mistake apply wording that makes sense in your language but actually is not exactly right from English perspective.
6106788
Thank you, mighty fox editor
6106641
Self-taught editor, so... yeah, kinda concur on all that. Doing everything yourself leaves only one person to blame, and puts more pressure on learning. Probably not even going to get an editor for any original work
In all fairness, even established and published fiction has some real stinkers on their pages. I refer you to the great Laquatus, for example, who had his name changed in the last part of the trilogy for... whatever reason. Leaving your own work to rest a while helps refresh your eyes and mind. It's an acquired skill, and it's never going to hit perfection stage. You should still try, sure, but don't let it cripple you, hmmkay?
6106810
I'm a more or less self-taught editor as well. Or, better said, my non-native English speaking mind is fast to notice if something in the sentence doesn't sit all that right.
Yep, that is great, but often neglected advice.
6106647
Yep, very much this. Heck, it's easy to do even on other people's work. The human brain is amazingly good at recognizing patterns and filling in small gaps in information. If we expect to see an "a" between two words, it's easy to skim over the text, take in the full intended meaning, but not realize that it was actually missing one of the words necessary to make it grammatically correct. You're more likely to do this in your own work (After all, you know what you meant!), but it's easy to do on other people's work if you're not paying close enough attention to the individual words.
6106641
My own weakness is the whole lie/lay/lay/laid/lain/laid mess (And yes, lay and lay are different, and laid and laid are different, because English). It's something I often have to stop and think on any time those words appear in my writing just to be sure I'm doing it right. I know which is which when I stop to evaluate their use, but I'll still often try to type the wrong one when I'm writing.
6106894
More than that, even. It's really kind of amazing just how adaptive our "visual auto-correct" really is. There's a famous experiment that involved scrambling words like 'college' into something more like 'cloelge' and inserting them randomly into a number of texts for test subjects to read. So long as the first and last letter are correct and the rest are at least roughly present, people can and often will overlook even the most mutilated of spellings without noticing. Turns out that the way we read words runs, in a big way, on nothing but visual pattern recognition - you don't actually read large parts of a text, in a letter-by-letter sense, you just match the shape of the words against what you know the shape of word should be and ignore most of the actual spelling.
For obvious reasons, that works even better with a text where you already roughly know what every word ought to be saying.
6106936
Hah, yeah. First time I came across that example, I got probably a third of the way through it before realizing. "Hey, wait a minute..."
6106948
I know that feeling.
6106641
Honestly, I'd even go as far as to say to close it out for a couple days, THEN go back and proofread one additional time. Even just going back and re-reading the chapters I'm about ready to publish, I'll often find more mistakes that I had overlooked when proofreading following my writing session
6106641
On the topic of numerals, when the number is over 101 you should use the numeral, unless the it's an easy number to write like two hundred or six thousand. The reason is that it's less distracting to see the numeral 172 than it is to have to read one hindered seventy-two. And of course it gets worse with higher numbers.
But if you want to highlight the fact that a character is saying a particularly high number, writing it out can guarantee that.
6107167
I'd qualify that by saying that if it's in dialogue, you should probably write it out as a rule, unless the number is really excessively long. Numerals fit best into narrative sections. Dialogue, ideally, reflects what the character is actually saying, while narration should be primarily informative.
It's a nitpick, but it's one of those little stylistic tricks that help give characters voice and a sense of being distinct from the narration. Actually writing them in a slightly different style from the rest of the story is a great way to distinguish them and make them feel like separate individuals.
6106641
Thank you.
6106647
Protip: write forward, proof backwards. If you're going forwards; you catch the thread of the story and are more likely to follow it uncritically. .typos over gloss and patterns up pick to harder far is it order; reverse in is word every When.
Highly, highly dependent on whose opinions, their relation to your audience, and whether the opinions jibe with each other, I'm afraid
6107406
I'd disagree with that. More criticism is always better. Which one you actually take is up to you, but a perspective you're never told about is one you can't take into account. You may not end up agreeing with, but just being told about a prospective problem is something that can be intensely useful anyway.
6107439
I'll agree that is a good idea to have one or two trusted pre-readers whose strengths and weaknesses you know. After that, however you get diminishing returns because of an unholy tag-team of the
Pareto principle (80% of badness is caused by 20% of the story) and Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is junk). The things you want criticism to catch are typically going to stem from a few core problems. As generally the really bad stuff you want to catch consists of flaws the average reader will have a problem with, you end up needing maybe 2-3 people to look at your story tops before you have located and cleaned up the stuff that will bug the average reader.
Consider also that the remaining stuff must necessarily have been not as bad as the things that first jumped out or else you would have fixed them first. Thus, the problems found tend to rapidly become smaller and more nitpicky while the effort to "fix" them stays the same or goes up in some cases. Now that all the low hanging advice has been given, the probability of another average reader giving you advice that's worth listening to becomes vanishingly small. No one critiques critics and anyone who reads can put on authoritative airs and critique, so the intelligent author will soon be throwing out nearly all of said advice because either it is redundant, there is no room for it in the story, or they are repeating misheard rules of thumb as gospel that would actually be downright harmful in your context. That takes time that you would much rather be using on your next effort and does not really get you that much.
In short: establishing a working relationship with 1-3 solid beta readers who have complementary strengths is all you really need for 98% of your writing needs. The other 2% comes from finding people who have a better understanding of what you are trying to achieve than you do and specifically approaching them with a purpose. Filtering even a moderate amount of rando criticism is not generally worth the effort. Might be worth a skim, but that is about it.
6107661
That's some really amusing mixture of arrogance and elitism you've got going there. The best stories I've seen here tend to come from people who are willing to listen and actively interact with their readers - not necessarily taking every criticism into account, but certainly listening. The type that decides an echo chamber of 2 people is more than enough and nobody else could really have anything left to add to that? Tends to have their heads way too far up their own asses to ever produce anything worthwhile.
6107682
There is a difference between M.A. Lawson going to a convention and mingling with his audience to gauge the mood of the room and actually letting the convention-goers edit an episode. I was under the impression that we were talking about the latter type of advice, not the former. I encourage you to go through the authors you think are the best and read the pre-reader accreditations on your favorite stories. You will find the same names cropping up repeatedly for a reason.
6106641
Okay, can someone answer this for me: When it comes to ellipses, are there spaces or not?
I'd always been taught there was a space between them ( . . . ) I wondered what everyone's opinions on this are.
6106936
I forced myself to stop and carefully read that, in case you'd actually done it there, too.
6107705
I happen to be listed on some of these and still have a pretty different standard of "good" from most people.
At any rate, what I'm hearing here is really a lot more "boo critics, y'alls just hating" than any kind of valid position, especially with that petty "no one critiques critics" thrown in. Pretty standard talk for the kind of author who's really more interesting in the sort of criticism that he wants to hear than the type that's actually liable to make him rethink and improve some of his writing decisions.
If there was a toplist of bad writing decisions, dismissing all further feedback because it's not on your list of approved critics would be pretty high near the top. That's an old argument, though, and I don't think I'm really going to change your mind there, so whatever.
6107710
There aren't. Also:
Speaking as someone who never gets critique, I am deeply confused by this thread.
I'm not bragging about this, either, it just means nobody cares, which is...depressing.
6107043
I also prefer to let stories lie, even for a few weeks. Not only because the errors become more visible, but also because I can view the content in slightly less subjective way. Thus, I can judge if the jokes are still funny and all.
6107808
Hmm... is there any story you'd like feedback on? Also, confusing in which sense?
6107180
You're welcome!
6107406
I'd agree with wlam here, the more people preread your story, the closer you are getting to the reflection of the real audience. However, sometimes it's a little tough choice and the author should have the last word.
6107956
>tfw can't get anyone to preread or edit
I never really tried to get anyone to do it, though.
6107710
They may or may not be. If you are using MS Word or GoogleDocs, they turn the sole three dots into the true ellipsis punctuation mark with 'halfspaces' between the dots. From what I have seen, it varies between languages and even English manuals of style. So, kinda up to the author, in the end.
6107710
Ah, that's one of the fun cases where there are multiple contradictory styles of doing it without any of them being technically wrong. Because of how loose the rules of English are, you have fun with different style guides saying different things, so "correct" and "incorrect" becomes more of a matter of "who are you writing professionally for?" The most common style I see is without spaces ( ... ), and that is the style I prefer, but spaced is a valid style, too. More confusingly, I've even seen style recommendations that you should always use spaced periods, unless the ellipses are next to a quotation mark, in which case they're unspaced... and may even be followed by a period (For four in a row) if it's the end of a sentence. Enjoy.