let's discuss!

[drasticbarbie.livejournal.com]

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.

Comments

[cedara]

I agree on grammar and homonyms - definitely a pet peeve. Typos can happen anytime, but that's what a good beta is for. Same goes for characterization - if you wanna be OOC, give me a damn good reason for it.

Also, if someone doesn't do empty lines between dialogue and/or story text (the BR html tag) - it's fine in books but it makes a text almost unreadable on the screen.

As for pairings. I can easily see Garcia/Morgan, Morgan/Reid, maybe even Hotch/Rossi, though my fave is Hotch/Reid.

[djan31.livejournal.com]

Is it bad that I just now figured out what OOC meant?
-face palm-

[drasticbarbie.livejournal.com]

i had to look up a bunch of things. don't feel bad.

[cedara]

Heh.

It's ok. We all learn as we go along.

[drasticbarbie.livejournal.com]

yes, no one will catch every error, even with great betas. i've even found typos in published books, one in LOTR. i won't even look at a fic without some spaces.

[stormy-mayday.livejournal.com]

Hotch/Reid = ♥♥♥

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nextboldmove_/]

how do you do that BR html tag? I write my fic with spaces in Word but when I copy it to the LJ it comes out without the empty lines and it really, really annoys me!

[cedara]

It goes like this < BR > (remove the empty spaces before and after the BR, like <BR )