ext_325559 ([identity profile] drasticbarbie.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] criminalxminds2010-01-03 08:16 am

let's discuss!

this if for those of you who read fanfic, which is hopefully most of you.

what are your fanfic pet peeves? is there a pairing or genre you won't read? do you hate mistakes in canon?

for me it's more about grammar. i get irritated with bad spelling (use spellcheck!), poor use of punctuation (besides commas because there are about 40 rules. you should know the basics), and capitalization. in posts i don't bother with caps. but when i publish i try to make it as correct as possible.

other things are the use of certain words. there/their/they're, we're/ were/where, bare/bear, lie/lay/laid etc., i/me, overuse of italics and bold. to me italics are good for emphasizing certain words that should be stressed, either in dialog or narration, sounds coming off the television/phone or written words read by the narrator or out loud in dialog, musical lyrics. it just makes it easier to understand that it isn't normal sounds. i only use bold in my author's note, disclaimer, and warnings.

also, i won't even read a fic that has all the text bunched up because someone didn't press enter. or something with only about 200 words.

also, when you address someone it should be like,   Person, blah blah. with the comma there. that just bugs me.

for specifically CM i won't read Morgan with anyone but Garcia. i don't know, i just think they belong together and i love that Garcia is one of very few average sized women on television. in spite of what hollywood wants us to think, most women are more Garcia's size than JJ's.

[identity profile] npkedit.livejournal.com 2010-01-03 03:46 pm (UTC)(link)
I'll join you in decrying poor grammar and spelling (I'm an editor in RL), and on the formatting issue.

That said, my biggest pet peeve is unfinished stories. If you start posting, you're doing it to attract readers and (hopefully) get feedback. One of the biggest joys of fanfic (and a reason even some pro writers do it) is the joy of immediate feedback and constructive criticism. It's blatantly unfair for writers to hook people and then leave them hanging forever. If you know you're the type who won't finish a story, don't post it for public reading. Otherwise you end up as the fanfic equivalent of "the boy who cried 'wolf.'"

[identity profile] djan31.livejournal.com 2010-01-03 03:50 pm (UTC)(link)
That is exactly why I stopped writing. I could never finish, and I realized how annoying that must be.

[identity profile] http://users.livejournal.com/_nextboldmove_/ 2010-01-04 05:05 pm (UTC)(link)
On the other side...if people don't comment then why bother?