Random grammar bitching

[jane_elliot]

Okay, seriously now.  This is starting to get embarrassing.

I just read the first page of a Merlin fic that will remain nameless to protect the grammatically impaired, and I have to admit it took me nearly the whole page to figure what was wrong with the writing because I'd never seen this problem before.  The issue?  The author started a new

Comments

[doro_chan]

I hate that. I can't even read short fics if they're formatted like that, and a lot of authors who write in German do that. I think it's because we were never really taught how to use paragraphs properly in school. I only learned it when I had to summarize a whole book in 15 pages and methodically coloured the book with markers. There was a system I discovered that way.

Regarding long Merlin fic: Have you read We're A Storm In Somebody Else's Teacup? It's quite long. There's Equilibrium too, but I didn't like it as much. Those were the only two fics longer than 40k in my delicious account.

[jane_elliot]

Huh. So does this mean that most German authors (when writing in German, of course) don't use paragraphs? Or is it just something that's considered so obvious that they don't bother teaching it? Very intriguing:)

I think I've read Equilibrium (i.e., the format and opening scene sound familiar, even if I can't remember much of the plot), but Storm appears to be completely new to me. Yay! Thanks:)

[doro_chan]

Well, German fanfic authors have problems with paragraphs. They never noticed they existed in books and thus don't use them, they use one per sentence, or they use them in weird ways that make no sense to me as a reader (=arbitrarily). At school, I just got told that paragraphs are used to group sentences "in ways that make sense". Once. The teachers were very vague about it, I'm not sure they ever learned it themselves. We didn't really learn anything about creative writing.

I forgot to add a warning for Storm, btw. It has minor character death (canon, well, kind of).

[jane_elliot]

*blink* So, uh, I guess there *is* a reason for me to keep explaining these random grammar rules. I've been debating leaving the explanation off, but if they are at all helpful to readers I'm happy to continue to include them. (Though, admittedly, I don't know how helpful they are to folks actually reading Rants -- most of the people watching the comm seem to be authors.)

And I'm currently reading Storm and loving it. Thanks! (And thanks for the warning:)

[lothy]

(Yes, I know this post's been here a while; I'm just reading through the comm for the first time!)

I've seen a lot of fics with paragraphing screw-ups, but I have never seen one where every sentence is a separate paragraph. Um, wow.

My personal dislike is fics with paragraphs so long that your eyes start to hurt reading them (especially on-screen). I've seen fics - far too many of them - with "paragraphs" that barely fit into one frame of my monitor.

[jane_elliot]

Ironically, paragraphs weren't actually invented to *combine* sentences -- they were actually invented to break up large blocks of text (once paper became cheap enough that it was acceptable to leave white space). Sometimes I think that fact needs to be expressed to newbie authors.