This is a bit of a vent, much like most of my entries are but it's also some words of wisdom for anyone reading.
There is a major difference between Gaian Literacy and Proper Literature.
I'm tired of hearing people say that they are advanced literate or that they're great writers justifying it with saying that they can write more than seven paragraphs, all containing more than ten sentences, and in these long and rediculous rambles of writing they attempt to get across to you a description of something that should've been described with one sentence. That is not literacy. That is idiocy.
Pick up a book. Read it. Tell me, how often do you see one character's point of veiw of an object that takes thirty sentences to describe? Rarely if not ever.
"Oh what about the Twilight series?" Gaian asked.
Drey raised a cold black revolver to said Gaian's head, pulled on the trigger and the Gaian fell to the ground after the deafening bang and devastation of the bullet did their duty.
Right there, what I just wrote, that is literature. Rich and short details. You need to learn to use dialogue and to have a good mix of it. Dialogue is what makes a post wet. Thought gives a post some taste. Description is what gives your post heat. If something has too much heat, it dries up and kills off it's own flavor. It looses it's flavor all together and becomes a heaping pile of hot coal. That is what you see in the 'adv. literate' roleplays these days, a bunch of posts that have no taste, have no flavor, have no succulence. So what do they do to cover up the lack of taste, flavor and succulence? They add pictures to cover it up and people accept that as good posting.
Talk about having low standards.
I prefer reading semi-literate threads who have a good mix of dialogue, thought and description over the gaian trash that they call literate.
Yes I'm attacking you Mister who posts giant length posts and presumes to be a good writer. You Mister don't know the fundamentals of creative writing. Don't worry though, I'll give you the equation you're looking for to make your post something everyone wants to read.
A proper post will require a mix of DIALOGUE, THOUGHT and DETAILS.
About 35-50% of your post should be dialogue. Make your character speak, take the words of who ever spoke and add it into your post along with the color. This allows for better understandment of the said conversation. That's called quoting - not in the sense of pressing the quote button or function on the gaia script, but in the sense that you've quoted what someone else just said. Use accents, make it seem like normal talk, don't write out every word if you don't need to. Use more contractions when talking like it's, haven't you, can't, don't, she's and they're. Does your character speak perfectly or join a few words together? 'Going to' or 'Gunna'? 'Girl' or 'Gurl'? 'Park the car' or 'Pa'k da kah'? These are the things that will make your post a thousand times better and probably get you some well deserved compliments. And a quick note, after you write out dialogue and you're adding a tag at the end. Keep it between 2-4 words.
Examples: "Yadda, Yadda, Yadda." He said. "You're stupid!" She hissed. "Stop it!" He yelled at her.
10-25% should be THOUGHT. Tell us what your character is thinking. It's normally done via italicized writing and it's private to your own character. It's not what other characters would know unless some character can read thoughts but none-the-less it's limiting what others might know, it explains why or how your character acts and it's needed for good and proper writing.
ONLY 20-45% of your post should be DETAILS or description. I don't want to know the color, the size, the distance, the numbers and specific background of the table in the middle of the room. Say it's there and maybe what material it's made out of. You can then tell me perhaps if it's polished or not, if it's painted or not. But I don't need to know the 1000% of how something came to be. We're not idiots. Paint the picture in our mind and keep in mind the global view of things, don't linger too much on something that's specific. Use rich details and not repeated details over and over again to describe something we can already understand. Sure details cover things like actions, setting and appearances but it's not description that our minds understand as flow or movement of writing. What makes your brain follow the writing and understand it as moving or flowing is the use of other things, the use of speaking and thinking.
What about the remaing 5-35%? That's in place for Narrative writing. Something like getting your character from point a to point b with the least amount of effort. For example. George left the house and walked to his car. That's yes an action but it's not full of description. After a narrative phrase you can go and add details to describe how your character did it in a different sentence.
A great post will have a mix of something like... 40% Dialogue, 40% Detail, 15% Thought and 5% Narrative. You add into that, mixed paragraph and sentence sizes along with varying sentence structures and you create perfect writing.
On gaia, what do we see?
85% Detail. 7% Narrative, 5% Dialogue and maybe 3% Thought. All of it in identical paragraph sizes and sentence lengths. Something along the lines of four or more paragraphs in length with boring and repetitive sentence sizes. This is just terrible writing in any way you look at it.
If you ask any professional writer about what they see on gaia, they'd tell you it's s**t writing. It's too dry, it has too many details, has no flow and worse off, it's hard to read and be focused on said writing for long period of times.
Even our brains can't stand reading that much, we claim that we get distracted from reading it but truly what it is, is your brain saying I don't like this, let's do something else. Let's go look at this here or that there, I don't want to read this dry piece of hot steaming coal. It's not even considered to be s**t cause s**t comes out of a human body and it's wet. This is just dry, hot and bland to the point that it hurts you to continue reading and writing.
Now I ask that you re-look at even this journal entry. Look at how I varied the sizes of my paragraphs, sentences and the length of it all. I tried to use various words and details to describe and make things flow. It's long enough to be called adv. literate writing, but it's structure, content and ideal is diferent.
We need a new Gaian Paradigm for Literacy. I hope you agree.
Drey Malic Community Member 
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