Welcome to Gaia! ::

And when I mean basic, I mean basic. This is stuff that I shouldn't even have to cover, but recent events in the WF have convinced me that I do.

1. Punctuation, grammar and proper capitalization.

There is simply no excuse for this. Why should we bother to read a story when the writer is so incredibly lazy and cares SO VERY LITTLE about his or her work that they can't even keep the story tidy? And I'm not talking about little misspellings here.

You all KNOW that there's been tons of stories where the words are just thrown in without ANY kind of punctuation, untill you can't even tell where one sentence ends and another is supposed to begin!

Guess what: Stories are not supposed to be PAINFUL to read. if youre storis hav no puctuiaton n r mispelt u will maek my head hurt u unerstand

And since I'm on the subject...YOUR and YOU'RE are not the ******** same. YOUR means it belongs to you. YOU'RE is the shortened version of YOU ARE. No ******** excuses.

THEIR and THEY'RE are the same as above. Only here you also get THERE, which means not HERE and nothing else.

And does it really tax someone's brain THAT MUCH to just start every sentence with a BIG LETTER like they were taught? Unless you started skipping school to smoke crack at the age of six...

2. Use the damned ENTER button

Assuming your story's reasonably clean of the above horrors, there are still plenty of ways to wreck it. Typing up huge, unbroken paragraphs of text is again painful and taxing to read, and the vast majority of people will simply not bother. Those few reviews you will get will all come from people who did not actually read the story, and at least some of the reviews will be left as a way to get you to read THEIR stories. (note the use of "their" as opposed to "there" wink

So yes, use paragraphs. Break up the text. You're trying to create an enjoyable experience here, after all, not making fine-print contracts.

Still on the paragraph front, DIALOGUE. In dialogue, two or more people are talking, and since reading is linear in nature, you have to skip between one person talking and another. Each change of perspective should be a new paragraph.

Do not, and I mean do NOT make huge paragraphs and then hide little snips of dialogue in the middle.

EXAMPLE!

Joey went to the beach and there he saw a cow lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip "Hello, cow," he said to the cow ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non "Moo," it replied proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad "I take offense to that," Joey objected minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum..

See that? Huge b*****d block of text, and somewhere in there are hidden two bits of dialogue. This is a horror, my friends. A horror. And this is with the dialogue being properly formatted. if you remove all the punctuation which marks it as dialogue...it's GONE.

3. Playing with the Size and Color of the Text

Don't. Just don't.

4. Stickies.

They're there for you to READ them. As opposed to NOT READ them.

"Their" and "they're" are the same?

I appreciate the ranty sentiment, but take time to proofread the parts that aren't supposed to be atrocities against the language. I don't think there should be a random ampersand after "THAT," for example, or that the "b" and "l" should be transposed in what was meant to be "reasonably."

Vitriol is understandable, but don't let it force your fingers too far ahead of your brain, and don't let it stop you from rereading your post before you click "submit."

I have clarified the "same" comment, as it was intended to mean that they are the same as the example of YOUR and YOU'RE.

Always true. People have to want to improve their writing on their own.
Myself, no matter how many times I read the differences between THERE and THEIR, I did not actually "take in" the differences until I decided I should know for my own benefit.

Thank you. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR GIVING US LITERATE FOLK A VOICE.

Punctuation is my hero. mrgreen

How do you figure that?

Amen.

Awful, punctuated paragraph blocks hurt my feelings as a reader. I agree with you completely.