Surfing the Pit

[wneleh]

My ten-year-old, G, and I have been surfing around FF.net almost every evening this summer, looking for fic for Disney and Teen Nick shows. She reads the summaries and picks stories out, and then I read them to her until she falls asleep. What I've been finding fascinating is, she has a totally different sense of what's good than I do

Comments

[aelfgyfu_mead]

there's joy in just rolling around in the summer grass with characters, really not doing very much.
Yes, sometimes there is!

(Of course, poor punctuation and grammar often give me hay fever, which makes rolling around in the summer grass less fun.)

My own ten-year-old hasn't got all that strong a grasp of grammar and punctuation, which drives me spare since I'm an English professor. It makes my husband, a mathematician, even crazier, actually; I don't know what his reason is, except that he has nearly flawless grammar and punctuation despite not having had an English class since high school. (BS, MS, ABD, and never took an English class after high school. Insists he didn't need one.) Part of her problem is that some of her teachers haven't learned it and misuse punctuation, misspell words, and use poor grammar.

I hope she will outgrow this. Small Child is an avid reader and should be absorbing these things the way BH and I first did.

[wneleh]

My own ten-year-old hasn't got all that strong a grasp of grammar and punctuation, which drives me spare since I'm an English professor.

Can she pick out mistakes in sentences? G seems to be able to, when pressed; but her own writing is... uh, I'll send a PM.

It makes my husband, a mathematician, even crazier, actually; I don't know what his reason is, except that he has nearly flawless grammar and punctuation despite not having had an English class since high school.Hmmm... I took a few literature classes in college, but I don't think they touched grammar and punctuation at all; I don't think it was ever dealt with after 9th grade. I think mine's degraded quite a bit since then

[aelfgyfu_mead]

Small Child can often pick out errors in sentences when told they are there. She doesn't go around cringing at signs and newspaper articles the way we do.

I can see an English prof being more sympathetic to variations in language usage than a mathematician
I guess so! I regularly teach History of the English Language, which has made me far more tolerant of language change and dialectal variation.

Just yesterday I saw "story's" used as a plural of story. How does the notion that that's correct get into someone's head?
I have seen plurals made incorrectly with apostrophes so many times that occasionally I slip and do it myself, which horrifies me more than I can convey in print. I think I have always caught it, but that I would ever do it in the first place. . . .

[sholio]

My childhood predates the Internet by a long shot, but I've gotten a general idea of this by going back and re-reading books that I absolutely loved when I was young. It's fascinating to compare my hazy, halcyonic memories to the reality -- often books that I remember being wonderlands of adventure and fun seem poorly plotted, badly written or meandering to my adult eyes. Or, more interesting yet, I appreciate totally different aspects of the book as an adult than I did as a kid. I once re-read a book that had been a childhood favorite and found that my favorite characters were completely inverted from when I was a kid: the "Everykid" type hero, who I remembered loving and identifying with, seemed like a bland hero-shaped hole in the scenery, while two of the supporting characters that I remembered hating as a kid, because of their personality flaws, I loved as an adult because of those same flaws

[wneleh]

often books that I remember being wonderlands of adventure and fun seem like poorly plotted, badly written or meandering to my adult eyes.

I've had this; but more often the opposite - books turn out to have actual plots! And meaning beyond the blindingly obvious! But I don't think I realized, until I was in my early 20s and taking a creative writing class at a community college, that a story was more than stuff happening, that a writer was more than a reporter of made-up events.

it's great to be reminded that there is nothing wrong with uncritical love and play, and that adult tastes in fiction don't necessarily map onto kid/teen tastes, which doesn't make either one invalid.Since I'm currently between more adult fandoms, I've been thinking about writing fic for the shows my kids watch - bring some quality. Gain the adulation of 13-year-olds. The first story I wrote for a tween show, though, got exactly 1 comment and very few hits, and that was from someone who didn't actually know the show :-/. Now I'm getting that what I

[teh_bug]

Teeheehee! I totally remember being in that phase when I was younger. :-) Plot? What plot? CHARACTER BOUNCY TIME! :D :D :D