Pranking The Royal Guard

Since I've recently abandoned all modesty and submitted The Price of a Smile to EQD, I figured I might as well submit it to The Royal Guard as well. So I did. But when I hit the Submit button, I discovered something very interesting.

The summary statistics for The Royal Guard submissions are public.

I'm being naughty and nopony can stop me!

I can't imagine this is intentional, but I don't know for certain that it isn't. Therefore, I invite y'all to check it out while it's still available (link is above the image). For one, it's pretty hilarious to read instructions from authors demanding somepony other than Titanium Dragon review their work.

Comments

[PresentPerfect]

lol XD I haven't left any instructions on mine, so I have nothing to fear!

[Trick Question]

3797558
Actually, I notice that one of the feedbacks somepony needed to correct was the word "alright". That's kind of bizarre from where I sit—alright is a dictionary word that's been used in print for more than two centuries now. And it doesn't bear the same meaning as "all right"!

Is TRG actually so picky as to say "you must use this word not that word"? I guess I'll find out soon enough.

[Fuzzyfurvert]

I should prank them by submitting my garbagecollection of fictional fanworks.

[horizon]

If nothing else, this was a good reminder that I've never thrown any submissions their way, so I dropped 'em a Human story to help fill their thinnest category. (If they accept it, anyway.)

3797629
Looks like the actual submission text said:

Error: "—“Alright” needs to be spelled as two words in fiction." Correction: This has been corrected.

So apparently one of their PRs did nitpick that.

Not that they're wrong by the style guides, but this is a case where if you look at actual usage, pedants are clinging desperately to a rule that's becoming as pointless a litmus test as their desire to not split infinitives. Alright has a distinct meaning [1], and frankly, if they can't find anything more important to complain about in a story, that's some exemplary quality for an amateur self-edited fic.

--
[1] "How'd you do on the test questions?" "All right." "You didn't miss any? Congratulations!" "Uh, no."

[Trick Question]

3798355
I'm kind of hoping they'll tell me to change my alrights to all rights, because I've already planned this snarky response:

All right. My submission has all ready been changed, and taken all together, I shall all ways be pedantic from here on.

[Trick Question]

3798355
Although, to be fair, since "all right" and "alright" presumably sound the same when pronounced in everyday speech, that distinction doesn't actually come up. That's probably why it's frowned upon: it looks like dialect, but it isn't.

That said, "all right" just doesn't look alright to me. Probably because that phrase should be a single word. People can and do differentiate between "already" and "all ready", even though they sound identical.

EDIT: I guess I just repeated a bunch of stuff you were trying to say.

[horizon]

3798568
Choir, comma, preaching. /)

[Trick Question]

3798622

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Another thing occurred to me about this. I only write "alright" as dialogue between two characters, or as part of an internal monologue. It isn't a description word, it's always speech. I'll need to think on this aspect of writing some more; it's interesting.

Also, I'm drastically cutting back on ... and — and especially ; and : in my writing now, but don't feel I need to do that when communicating pony-to-pony for some reason.

[Titanium Dragon]

3798355
The problem is most likely that they spelled "all right" as "alright" in a situation where that was wrong.

If you say "You got them alright" and you meant "You got them all right", you made a mistake.

"You're alright" and "You're all right" mean two different things - the former is "You're okay" and the later is "You guys are all correct".

I can't tell you for sure without looking at the story in question, though.

frankly, if they can't find anything more important to complain about in a story, that's some exemplary quality for an amateur self-edited fic.

Unfortunately, it is often easier to nitpick minor errors than it is to address large problems. One of the things we look out for when writing rejection PMs is whether or not, if they fixed all the problems we listed in the PM, we'd accept the story. If not, we go back and try and figure out what we're really rejecting it for.

This also means we'll sometimes throw in things like "this word does not mean what you think it means" and "this story was very slow-paced and nothing really happened" in the same PM.

[Trick Question]

3799171
3798355
Based on the nature of the response, I'd guess that the issues with the script were so significant that the reviewer tried to pile on every nitpick they could in order to send the message, "You're not ready for prime-time yet."

I don't know if that's necessarily a useful thing or not. I've noticed in critiques that it's better to aim for the biggest issues and ignore the minor things. When I start nitpicking word choice in the Writeoffs, it's either something bizarre, or else I simply couldn't find anything notable that needed improvement. Maybe that's not something you can afford to do when you have to manage resubmissions, though.

[Calipony]

Doesn't that Celestia look small and anorectic?
Also Celestia wasting a pie on a prank sounds very unrealistic to me.