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

[drasticbarbie.livejournal.com]

okay, i will make an exception for you if you're from around here also. the most irritating thing about it is that most people writing it aren't from here. and i know people from NO and they don't talk like that. people from some other areas do, like Thibodaux. but not NO, not from within the city itself. i think people assume that NO is the only city in Louisiana or that it's the only place worth going to. but they are so wrong!

i tend to drop the g's from ing words if i write a Southern character. and i might through in gotta, gonna, hafta, and so forth, as long as their from an area where i've been or know people from there.

the x-men writers also had one of their characters speak Spanish in his debut issue, then said he was from Brazil where people speak Portuguese. after that they couldn't go back and change it. think the guy's name was Skin.

the dialogue was okay for keeping the characters in character in X-Men, it could just be very difficult to follow. mais yeah, cher?

[kuriadalmatia.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't necessarily need an exception. My early X-Men fics were pretty bad, especially with the accent thing, as I got familiar with the characters. I'm actually originally from Louisville, Kentucky and when the CM episode was there... I was disappointed that the lead Cop of the Week had such a pronounced Southern accent. Most from Louisville have a flattened Mid-Western accent.

But yeah, it goes back to your earlier point: write what you know. Especially when it comes to writing accents.

I think it was Skin. I remember that and thinking, er, Brazil=Portuguese. And Brazilian Portuguese is different that Portuguese Portuguese (if that makes sense). My job took me to Lisbon and I had a heck of a time tracking down a non-Brazilian Portuguese phrase book.

Cheers and thanks for the great thread!