Punctuation, grammar and spelling are important

therosesword 2021-01-16 20:22:22 UTC #1

Let me make this clear up front: I suck at punctuation and grammar and fortunately I have an Amazon echo to help me with spelling... so I'm a bit of an expert on bad PG&S.

Lately I have started to read stories (here and elsewhere) where the punctuation and grammar need a lot of help.

I take into consideration that this is a global community and many people are writing in a second or even third or fourth language from their native tongue. I am in awe of you folks, truly. To actually sit down and write in a language other than your own is a skill I can never attain.

So I do try to look at punctuation and grammar problems thinking about this (and also, having a profoundly dyslexic sister I take that into consideration too that there are writers here who also have this to work with.}

All that said, might I offer that big problems with punctuation and grammar do make it hard to read a piece (I've stopped with several) and can, with some readers, affect their reaction to the work. There is a reason professional publications ask for well formatted and punctuated work. It also shows a degree of professional attitude.

There are ways to correct problems; from the program you use to write with to asking for readers to help you with those things specifically. I rely greatly on my beta readers to help out there.

I also tend to contact writers via private message about such issues instead of making remarks in their comments section.

Just a thought.

nathanKmcwilliams 2021-01-16 22:31:59 UTC #2

Important grammer and spellign a'm?

ar-ninetysix 2021-01-16 22:38:02 UTC #3

Ye we english rly good here

therosesword 2021-01-16 22:38:42 UTC #4

oh yeah if it weren't for Alexa... ouch

uselessgoddess 2021-01-17 01:25:07 UTC #5

Me after purposely making my characters to speak broken English: now nobody can correct my grammar!

ProWriting Aid and Grammarly can help a lot, just copy-paste and see how (bad) you do and what needs to be corrected. I feel like ProWriting Aid has more features (or it is just what I am more familiar with). It is especially helpful when checking for trivialities (a.k.a things I can't tell the difference) like missing determiner or verb forms.

therosesword 2021-01-17 01:39:32 UTC #6

Anything that helps should be used. People tend to blow this off but it doesn't just make a difference here, if they have something that they want to submit elsewhere, even to a contest, it makes a difference. Yes, they can run things through here or another writers site just to work it but why not do it right from the beginning?

I've helped out in and been a judge on a couple of contests. I've seen manuscripts get tossed because people wouldn't do proper formatting or the errors were so plentiful. I'm not talking about a comma wrong here or there, etc. I'm talking about multiple errors from page one of spacing, commas, semi-colons, apostrophes, etc. Essentially, the simpler things.

We had specific guidelines for submittal at my old job. There was a reason; with our format our directors and tech people could take one look at a script and know roughly how long it would be, how much time per page etc. We'd have submitters argue with us and say to get back to them and they'd do it after we accepted it. They never heard from us again.

In the case of your broken English speaker (good chuckle there)... no problem, been there done it. I've even had characters do massive, lengthy run on sentences. The only way I break them up it to have the character take a breath.

Phantomlight 2021-01-17 01:47:54 UTC #7

Reminds me of this:

And I agree, though I still need work on all three xD

therosesword 2021-01-17 01:52:23 UTC #8

That's why I rely on beta readers and programs and I watch for those little lines under words. Like I said, I suck at all three. I keep asking Alexa spelling questions to the point I'm waiting for her to offer me dictionaries from Amazon... not that I don't have a freaking shelf full of them.

By the way, I almost used that meme.

But, for the people who want to pursue this for a career, they will find that manuscripts will be rejected for these very problems so they may as well get in the habit now.

HippieGhost 2021-01-17 02:13:10 UTC #9

It can definitely be a turnoff. Usually when reading I try no to take it too heavily into account but I feel like it really depends on how seriously I intend on taking the work. In either case I try to be as "proper" as possible in my punctuation. That said, I do need to go back through all of my stories and replace a large portion of my periods in dialogue with commas. I have a lot of cases of ("that's pretty nice." Erik said.) in my work, so I need to go back and fix that.

therosesword 2021-01-17 02:50:55 UTC #10

Most of the time I can ignore it. I'm not perfect and I know no matter how much I proof read things are going to be missed. But when it actually makes things hard to read I end up not reading any further.

Don't you hate when you're positive it's all okay and you got back later and bam! There's the typo of the comma or whatever... sigh

HippieGhost 2021-01-17 02:53:40 UTC #11

Honestly what threw me off was bad advice. I had looked it up to see if it was grammatically correct, and the site I went to (I forget which) gave the green light. I'll probably run through it Monday or something. Luckily a friend of mine caught it the other day.

therosesword 2021-01-17 03:02:24 UTC #12

I've always hated that. What site gave you the wrong advice. I want to know to avoid them.

HippieGhost 2021-01-17 03:04:46 UTC #13

I can't remember at the moment, and a google search of the same question I asked yields different (and better) results, but if I figure it out I'll let you know pretty much right away. It could have been too that the advice was just poorly worded. In either case I'm going to be a lot more careful from now on.

therosesword 2021-01-17 03:13:01 UTC #14

i have to admit I rely on Word but even that isn't the best. It has suggested commas in places that are absurd.

HippieGhost 2021-01-17 03:24:30 UTC #15

My other problem is that I go from actually splitting up my sentences like a normal person, to having sentences that last a paragraph and are written like I'm from the 1800's because of all of the pauses.

cherrystark 2021-01-17 03:40:51 UTC #16

Good punctuation, grammar, and spelling are incredibly important for me. Like everyone, i do make mistakes at it. I can forgive smaller mistakes if the readability of the story isn't compromised.

I tend to get pickier about it when there are rampant spelling errors or they try to be different with how they format dialogue, for example. One story i beta read, he chose to forgo quotation marks and dialogue tags, opting instead to bullet-point ever dialogue line.

therosesword 2021-01-17 03:53:02 UTC #17

Ummm, I... Ummmm, I have no words.

paracosmosfiction 2021-01-17 03:57:34 UTC #18

Grammarly has been a life saver for me!

cherrystark 2021-01-17 04:03:15 UTC #19

The writer was trying to mix a variation of script format dialogue with standard novel formatting. It was as easy to read as you'd imagine it to be.

NickRowler 2021-01-17 06:05:17 UTC #20

I can relate, I have always had bad dyslexia and struggled in school. I had a professor even question if English was my native language (it is). Professor also told me my writing was "too casual" which I guess benefits me in some way, seeing how I mostly write dialog.

I've had teachers tell me that "if you want to get better, read more", tho I am not sure if that is 100% true. I still misspell basic words, but most people don't know because of spellcheck.

I feel like something that helped me with punctuation was listening to the flow of a sentence. This can also apply to grammar too. I feel like focusing on listening more has helped me a lot.