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Okay, I promised I wasn't going to bitch or whine in here about the archives for at least two months and I'm trying to be good. So instead of whining about things, let me just say that after a series of... ahem... colourful mails from an author concerning rejection letters and the contents thereof, I have some comments, observations and questions.
One of the things Leah and I find with the archive is that a lot of authors really struggle with punctuation, particularly the punctuation of speech and the failure to use full stops, leading to run on sentences. In fact, we found that these sorts of errors were so common that we sat down and wrote the 'Minimal Quality Guidelines' for Wraithbait, which set out the kinds of things we reject for so that authors could be forewarned.
It's still happening, and after it happened again last night, with associated... colourful e-mails, I started to wonder whether a) it was me, b) it was them or c) it was the state of teaching these days.
So in order to make sure it wasn't me, I asked around the office to double check my understanding of the correct way to punctuate speech (because I tend to doubt myself a lot :)) and not one of the six people I asked, all professionals and educated to near or graduate level, picked the answer I thought was right.
It made me doubt myself so much that it wasn't until another colleague pulled a novel out that she was reading at lunchtime to confirm that, yes, I was right, that I started to relax.
But it made me think rather hard about the whole 'grammar' thing and just how important readers of fanfiction find it. I know how important I think it is - very - but am I just weird and grammar obsessed? Also, while I think that grammar is important in the finished, 'published' work, I don't think that it's the only tool in the writer's box, and probably not the best tool for the job of actually writing a story. That takes that 'spark' of creativity, and in writing fanfiction it also takes a good eye for the characters and a good ear for their dialogue and the way they interact with each other, and the ability to reproduce that in a story.
I do think, however, that any writer who hasn't got a grasp of the technical aspects should get a beta reader who has that grasp to look at the story before posting. After all, while grammar can be learnt and it's more difficult to learn the other aspects of writing such as plotting, pacing and characterisation, errors in grammar are the easiest things for a competent beta reader to spot, point out and convince an author to change before posting.
At least that's my take on it :)
So I thought I'd conduct a poll to see what other people thought.
The poll is open to everyone, and I'm going to make this post public so anyone can take it. I am, however, going to keep the results private to me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I don't want people's responses to be influenced by what the majority answers are at any point in time, and secondly, I do know that not everyone has the same grasp of grammar, nor should they (see my point about beta readers above) and I don't think it's fair to make all those answers public.
In other words, I'm looking for honesty.
I'll leave it open a couple of weeks, and then I'll anonymise and summarise the results.
And it's guaranteed that this post will contain multiple spelling, punctuation and grammar errors :) Posts like this always do. Can I blame it on the fact that I'm bloody freezing and my fingers are like icicles?
Brrrrrr.
[ETA: The reason that I'm asking for whether your first language is English, American English etc is that it has been claimed that punctuation of speech differs - in fact, one of the 'colourful' e-mails was about how unfair it was to impose American English grammar rules on an English author. Sucked, then, that she had the story read and commented on by someone who's English. As opposed to the other non-US admin ::g:: So while I'm pretty damned sure that American grammar rules don't differ from English, Australian or Canadian on this point, I'm trying to confirm that :)]
[Poll #658517]
One of the things Leah and I find with the archive is that a lot of authors really struggle with punctuation, particularly the punctuation of speech and the failure to use full stops, leading to run on sentences. In fact, we found that these sorts of errors were so common that we sat down and wrote the 'Minimal Quality Guidelines' for Wraithbait, which set out the kinds of things we reject for so that authors could be forewarned.
It's still happening, and after it happened again last night, with associated... colourful e-mails, I started to wonder whether a) it was me, b) it was them or c) it was the state of teaching these days.
So in order to make sure it wasn't me, I asked around the office to double check my understanding of the correct way to punctuate speech (because I tend to doubt myself a lot :)) and not one of the six people I asked, all professionals and educated to near or graduate level, picked the answer I thought was right.
It made me doubt myself so much that it wasn't until another colleague pulled a novel out that she was reading at lunchtime to confirm that, yes, I was right, that I started to relax.
But it made me think rather hard about the whole 'grammar' thing and just how important readers of fanfiction find it. I know how important I think it is - very - but am I just weird and grammar obsessed? Also, while I think that grammar is important in the finished, 'published' work, I don't think that it's the only tool in the writer's box, and probably not the best tool for the job of actually writing a story. That takes that 'spark' of creativity, and in writing fanfiction it also takes a good eye for the characters and a good ear for their dialogue and the way they interact with each other, and the ability to reproduce that in a story.
I do think, however, that any writer who hasn't got a grasp of the technical aspects should get a beta reader who has that grasp to look at the story before posting. After all, while grammar can be learnt and it's more difficult to learn the other aspects of writing such as plotting, pacing and characterisation, errors in grammar are the easiest things for a competent beta reader to spot, point out and convince an author to change before posting.
At least that's my take on it :)
So I thought I'd conduct a poll to see what other people thought.
The poll is open to everyone, and I'm going to make this post public so anyone can take it. I am, however, going to keep the results private to me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I don't want people's responses to be influenced by what the majority answers are at any point in time, and secondly, I do know that not everyone has the same grasp of grammar, nor should they (see my point about beta readers above) and I don't think it's fair to make all those answers public.
In other words, I'm looking for honesty.
I'll leave it open a couple of weeks, and then I'll anonymise and summarise the results.
And it's guaranteed that this post will contain multiple spelling, punctuation and grammar errors :) Posts like this always do. Can I blame it on the fact that I'm bloody freezing and my fingers are like icicles?
Brrrrrr.
[ETA: The reason that I'm asking for whether your first language is English, American English etc is that it has been claimed that punctuation of speech differs - in fact, one of the 'colourful' e-mails was about how unfair it was to impose American English grammar rules on an English author. Sucked, then, that she had the story read and commented on by someone who's English. As opposed to the other non-US admin ::g:: So while I'm pretty damned sure that American grammar rules don't differ from English, Australian or Canadian on this point, I'm trying to confirm that :)]
[Poll #658517]
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From:
no subject
However ...
It seems to me that what is needed is a clear & inarguable style book.
If you tell your authors that their work must be grammatically acceptable, they will argue spelling, punctuation and general usage until doomsday.
If, on the other hand, you hand them a list of rules ... Well, they may bitch madly that you're Mean Nasty Horrible Unfair Archivists, but at least it doesn't give them any wiggle room when you tell them to clean up their (collective) act.
It seems to me that it would also simplify your approval process. "Here are the rules," you could say, "Follow them, and we'll all be happier."
Personally, I love style books. My usage is an odd mix of US, UK & NZ (with a dash of Aussie), so it makes life much easier if I know which of the varied rules are in play at any given time.
Just a thought ...
From:
no subject
Creativity is highly valued in the fanfic community, and rightly so. While there are exercises that can help you expand your thinking processes and lead you to new ideas, the base creative process is still pretty mysterious and idiosyncratic. Not so with grammar. You just have to get off your ass (or get a qualified beta) and do it.
Proper usage, spelling, and punctuation do not have to impede the flow of creativity in any way. By definition, anybody on LJ is composing on a computer, where revision is easy and all old copies can be stored painlessly. There is less excuse than ever for submitting a story that flowed straight from brain to keyboard with no editorial process in between.
Failure to make a decent effort at standarizing the style of your writing is, ultimately, discourteous to your readers. Don't be offended if your laziness puts them off.
From:
Here via metafandom
That said, there is the other side of the coin: if I am ever again cursed with a beta/editor/proofreader who Americanises my spellings, gelds my idioms by the imposition of rigid attention to agreement, throttles my semicolons, rearranges my commas freely and according to some arcane rule she seems to have learned in Business English 9E, imposes unnaturally perfect grammar on all of my dialogue including the bit that happens during a (if I do say so myself) fairly spectacular bit of shagging --shagging the likes of which, if I do say so as shouldn't, as might reasonably have caused Lynn Truss herself to utter a sentence fragment -- and turns every single one of the beloved subclauses of my many adored extremely long sentences into its own sentence, I shall probably be forced to commit an unpleasantry; I only wish I were making this up. I am in fact not making this up. I am still on good terms with the lady, but only because I have never since let her see any story of mine until it was publically posted.
So it's all according. ECCENTRIC grammar, if consistent and not damaging to the meaning, I will happily accept amazing quantities of.
A clear failure to understand the fundamentals, no, that drives me mad too.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Anybody who's editing for publication, or even possibly an archive, can publicize "house style" for their publication, and reasonably expect authors to make good effort to comply, or find their otherwise-nifty work rejected.
Anybody who is in an accept/reject position and doesn't make their preferences clear, should not be surprised if submissions don't meet their standards. "Correct grammar" is a really ambiguous standard, as there are lots of ways to be correct, and even more ways to be not-quite-right-but-it-works-in-this-situation.
Since it's tedious to list a whole lot of rules, lots of publications simply reference some pre-existing standard for their house style standards--the Bedford Handbook, Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk & White, etc. Plus maybe a few addtional rules that these venerable mainstream tomes don't cover ("we prefer 'cum' not 'come'").
Now i'm going to be embarassed if someone else has already said this more clearly and less inflammatorilly (is that a word?) But I had to get it off my chest. I do hope this is a helpful, not snarky comment. I'm not god, I only had a wee bit of grad school and some editing for publication in scholarly journals, so really I thought if *I* knew it, this stuff must be common knowledge.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
There's been so much emphasis in the past twenty years or so on 'authentic' speech, 'ethnic' speech, etc., that correcting grammar seems to be viewed as an act of oppression. In addition, text messaging, cutesy spelling, and spelling and grammar as an act of rebellion (Would I Die 4 U?) has overridden the basic reason for a system of grammar.
That is: writing is an act of communication. If I can't read what you've written, if I can't understand it, YOU HAVE FAILED. I have not. It's the writer's job to put the words together so that what they say is understandable. It's not mine to struggle through your writing to understand what the words are supposed to say. To uncover the meaning: that's my task. Not to make sense of bad grammar.
From:
no subject
I did not learn grammar at school at all; I learned grammar from reading copiously, my mother (who did learn grammar in school) proofreading my essays, and by checking things I'm not sure of in stylebooks. I learned about parts of speech by studying Russian, ironically enough.
I have a few grammar issues I'm iffy on, my punctuation oscillates between UK and US if I don't pay close attention to it, and I can't diagram a sentence to save my life, but my grammar and punctuation are much better than "okay."
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Not to be snarky or anything, but honestly? How does one go about finding one of those - not just someone who claims to be such - and once you get one, if you're not proficient in English grammar, how do you know their corrections are correct?
Because in my long fanfic experience, I find betas to be a dime a dozen.
Good betas are one in a million.
From:
I *am* a grammar snob, yeah.
I said that the quality (of grammar in fic) hasn't declined in recent years, but I also tend to ... mmm, preselect, I suppose you could say. There are authors I will not read, there are forums I do not lurk in, and there are sites I will not visit, because I've found that their standards for acceptable grammar don't match mine. I find that this makes my fic-reading experience much happier.
I've also found that (in general), the younger a fanperson is, the worse his/her grammar is. Younger fanpersons (sixteen-seventeen) also tend to feel that, so long as a story is understandable, grammar doesn't really matter, though they seem to grow out of that. (This is all based on watching my sister's fic-writing efforts over her shoulder, and some notable discussions about betas and their relative worth.)
I also note that you're not asking for ages, or time spent in fandom, which I think tend to be positively correlated to grammar-snobbery and skill, albeit loosely. (Brought to you by a twenty-three year old with nine years [!!!] in online fandom. She should be asleep, really.)