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Feb. 2nd, 2011 11:39 pmSo I've given 686 reviews. I have no idea how many stories were deleted over this, because a lot of people did the delete/repost thing and some people who are brighter than them may be waiting until the month is over to repost, so even going through the links wouldn't tell me much.
Normally I stalk the Just In page for this, but this month I've been behind. The major thing I noticed from that is the lack of reviews. Aside from attention whoring submit-an-OC fics, most had few to no reviews. As a number of newbies reviewed their story while signed in, I'm suspicious about how many anonymous reviews were done by cleverer authors. This is kind of depressing. I'm not even sure if I can say that this is a problem on the reviewers' side, because god damn do most of these fics suck. Looking for even mediocre stories is an exercise in tedium, and I can't help but wonder how many people are actually reading.
Of the 686, 370 of them got the dialogue paragraph. That's not counting the number of stories bad enough for me to just tell them to get a beta reader, yell at them for writing songfic or anything else that made me ragequit early rather than list errors, and there's also a number where was no dialogue to screw up. In fairness, a number of them had what looked like errors as opposed to systematically doing it wrong, but still. I spam the dialogue bit constantly and I just did NaRe a few months ago, I'm not really sure what more I could do. I guess actually reply to everyone who PMs me about "omg long paragraph is looooong" and try to talk them through it would be the next step in futility, but fuck that.
And the thing is, until more people do it and readers can get used to seeing how it works, individual authors will still struggle with the explanation and new authors will keep making the same mistakes. It's one of those tipping point problems.
We really need some sort of reviewing/betaing movement that doesn't involve me doing all of the work.
Normally I stalk the Just In page for this, but this month I've been behind. The major thing I noticed from that is the lack of reviews. Aside from attention whoring submit-an-OC fics, most had few to no reviews. As a number of newbies reviewed their story while signed in, I'm suspicious about how many anonymous reviews were done by cleverer authors. This is kind of depressing. I'm not even sure if I can say that this is a problem on the reviewers' side, because god damn do most of these fics suck. Looking for even mediocre stories is an exercise in tedium, and I can't help but wonder how many people are actually reading.
Of the 686, 370 of them got the dialogue paragraph. That's not counting the number of stories bad enough for me to just tell them to get a beta reader, yell at them for writing songfic or anything else that made me ragequit early rather than list errors, and there's also a number where was no dialogue to screw up. In fairness, a number of them had what looked like errors as opposed to systematically doing it wrong, but still. I spam the dialogue bit constantly and I just did NaRe a few months ago, I'm not really sure what more I could do. I guess actually reply to everyone who PMs me about "omg long paragraph is looooong" and try to talk them through it would be the next step in futility, but fuck that.
And the thing is, until more people do it and readers can get used to seeing how it works, individual authors will still struggle with the explanation and new authors will keep making the same mistakes. It's one of those tipping point problems.
We really need some sort of reviewing/betaing movement that doesn't involve me doing all of the work.
