Post by tanshin on Nov 19, 2009 3:24:59 GMT -5
A very special thanks to Bozocat for helping me write this.
* 1 Basics
* 2 Paragraphing
* 3 Tags
~o 3.1 Required
~~+ 3.1.1 Summary
~o 3.2 Commonly Used
~~+ 3.2.1 Location
~~+ 3.2.2 Timestamp/Sequence
~~+ 3.2.3 Authors
~~+ 3.2.4 OOC/IC
~~+ 3.2.5 Narration
* 4 Common Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation Problems
~o 4.1 Consistent Tense and Voice
~~+ 4.1.1 Tense
~~+ 4.1.2 Voice
~o 4.2 Run-on Sentences
~o 4.3 Comma Splices
~o 4.4 Homophone Errors
~o 4.5 Forgotten Capitalization
~o 4.6 Apostrophes, Contractions, Possessives
~o 4.7 Commonly misused words
* 5 Clarity
~o 5.1 Why Clarity is Good
~o 5.2 Unclear Pronouns
~~+ 5.2.1 Never start a paragraph with pronouns
~~+ 5.2.2 A pronoun always refers to the most recent noun before it that it can refer to
~~+ 5.2.3 Vague Pronouns for Abstracts
~o 5.3 Deliberately Vague Writing
~~+ 5.3.1 The events being portrayed are unclear to the viewer
~~+ 5.3.2 Secrets are being kept from the reader
~~+ 5.3.3 To give an air of mystery
~~+ 5.3.4 To preserve reader sensibilities
~~+ 5.3.5 Laziness
~~+ 5.3.6 To make fun of any of the above
~o 5.4 Give People Names
~o 5.5 Refresh Our Memory
~o 5.6 Who's Talking?
* 6 Other
~o 6.1 Use a spell checker
~o 6.2 Search for Stray Characters
~o 6.3 Take a Read Over
Basics
This page exists to try to improve the style of everyone's writing by addressing a number of shallow, stylistic issues that should all take very little effort for individual authors to implement. Issues here have been picked because:
* They are commonly a problem
* They can be fixed easily
* The benefits strongly outweigh the effort required
I have tried to note which things are considered optional-- but even optional things should be done. The more you do, the easier your post is to read, the higher the percentage of the reader base will read them, the sooner they'll get read, the more people will want to write with you. You want people to read your stuff, right?
[Pessimism]Unfortunately, the people who are the worst probably won't read this.[/Pessimism]
Please fix anything here that's actively wrong. If you have other comments or opinions, the talk page is available.
Paragraphing
Paragraphing is nothing special-- the rules here are the same as the rules all over the internet. Each paragraph is separated from the paragraph above by a single empty line. No exceptions. No weird grouping of paragraphs by varying numbers of carriage returns for reasons known only to the author. While most novels indent their paragraphs, the HTML standard specifically does not indent paragraphs, and since the forums are rendered in the world wide web, they follow HTML's example.
This section is an example of good paragraphing.
Paragraphs should begin when a new person speaks, when the dialogue itself would have a paragraph, and when the general subject being described changes. If you want a section break that's stronger than a simple paragraph break, you should use something to indicate what kind of stronger break it is.
* "* * *" is often used to indicate the passage of time. An empty line precedes and follows this indication.
* "-----" is often used to indicate a change of place or point of view. An empty line precedes and follows this indication.
* " your stuff goes here " is often used to indicate the presence of a flashback, dream sequence, or other mental action. If you need to do italics inside the italicized section, just undo the italics, like so:
Dess lay in her bed, thinking about past events.
Dess did stuff in a flashback. Man, I hate flashbacks. But Dess didn't have to worry about the flashback for long.
Dess woke up from the flashback, feeling peeved that she'd been used as an example.
Tags
Tags are those little things in bold you often see in posts to give them more definition.
Required:
Summary
The only required tag is Summary. Summaries are there for a bunch of reasons.
* Summaries add clarity. When something wonky is happening in a post, it really helps to have a succint restatement of what happened.
* Summaries are a great place to be funny or in character.
* When someone summarizes a thread, they use the summaries to do it. Those summaries end up being the wiki articles. Thread summaries are created by reading post summaries. If you don't write a summary for your post, it probably won't end up in the thread summary, and thus not on the wiki.
* Summaries help people quickly locate old posts. "Man, when was that post where Ash fought Niwatori Chinou and got turned stupid?" Much easier to scan through summaries than posts.
* Some of us high-and-mighty types won't read posts that don't have summaries. You don't have the time to write one? That's nice, we don't have the time to read one. So don't omit the summary to get people to read your hard work. We won't. We'll do the opposite.
A particularly galling variant of this are people whose summaries consist of "read it". If you feel it shouldn't be summarized, don't include a summary tag. It's insulting.
Commonly Used
Location
Says where a post is taking place. Sometimes you don't want to take the time to write setting-- this is a nice way to cut to the chase.
Timestamp/Sequence
When we get back to hard-canon, these will become required again. It can be very hard to tell what's happening when. Timestamp helps people quickly sort this out without having to comb the post for temporal details like position of the sun, other recognizable events, and soforth.
Authors
Some people like credit for their work. When coposting, it's polite to include their names.
OOC/IC
Stands for Out of Character and In Character respectively. This is a nice way of showing what's you talking and what's your characters talking.
Narration
For those of us who like to write in first person, it's not always clear who's talking. This is an easy way to establish that "I" is in fact Dess, that sniper, and not Dom the Deadpan Snarker.
Common Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation Problems
These are all grammatical problems that have occurred in real posts. The examples used are made up to avoid singling people out, but if desired I could start culling real examples from the thread. They're all quite common. Having poor grammar in a post jars and distracts readers who are used to good grammar. They also make you seem less educated and intelligent. Too many in too small a place can make the meaning of what's happening unclear, or frustrate the reader out of reading the post.
Consistent Tense and Voice
Tense is when your verbs happen. Voice is who does them. Within any one section (for instance, the piece of a post that's not in a flashback), tense and voice should remain consistent throughout. Consistent does not mean the same thing as "constant", which is a big source of slipups.
Tense
Generally I always write in the past perfect tense. For those of you who didn't spend 5 years taking Latin, that means writing like this:
"Strauss ran up the stairs, slammed the door open, and was prompty devoured by zombies."
Use of -ed is the name of the game, when you're referring to things that are happening right there in the post.
When you're talking about stuff that happened before the post took place, you move to the pluperfect tense. In plainer English, that means writing like this:
"Strauss had gotten almost no sleep last night."
Finally, some people want to put immediacy in their posts to make it feel like it's happening right now. The present tense isn't the way to do this-- it just feels silly. What you should use is the past imperfect tense, which looks like the first half of this sentence (the second half is plain old past perfect):
"Strauss was dodging backwards when the anvil fell on him."
Proper use of tenses keeps it clear when things are happening, which can save a lot of confusion and frustration on the part of the readers. Also the present tense sounds really weird in this style of writing. Imagine reading a book written that way.
Voice
Voice in grammar just means what the subject of the verbs is. I'm going to assume that's relatively easy for people to keep consistent, though occasionally BozoCat messes up and flips between third person ("Ash ran down the hallway") and first person ("I ran down the hallway") within one post, which is a big no-no.
The other thing to consider with voice, on a more stylistic and less grammatical note, is the place the narrator sits. There are three kinds of third-person narrators that we care about.
* Third person, limitted to sensory. You don't get into people's heads or motivations, and just show what's happening. Sometimes, you only show what one character is perceiving. If you do this, make sure it's always the same character within a section. Paragraphs that show the perceptions of two different characters alternatingly are very jarring (this frequently happens in coposts).
* Third person, over-the-shoulder. You get into one character's head and motivations, and also show what's happening from their point of view. This is most common, with authors narrating their own characters' motivations. It's important not to slip in other people's motivations if the character whose shoulder you're looking over isn't aware of them (otherwise it'll feel like you're metagaming, i.e. using author knowledge in character). Sometimes the narrator may be unreliable. A good way to indicate thoughts and opinions as opposed to statements of fact is to use italics.
* Third person, omniscient. You write everyone's motivations. If using italics, be sure to add a tag of "he thought" or "she thought" afterwards to make it clear who's doing the thinking.
Consistent voice will strengthen your characterization, keep author and character knowledge separate, and keep it clear who's thinking what. Inconsistent voice makes it obvious that a post was written by two or more separate people, which is very distracting.
Run-on Sentences
"Bob the Remarkably Durable Zombie shambled onto the stage then took a bite out of Dess's shoulder."
A run-on sentence is two sentences (or very-close-to-sentences) that are not separated by anything when they should be separated by a period. The most common way I see these is with people using the word "then" as a conjuction. In other words, this sentence is fine while the above is a run-on:
"Bob the Remarkably Durable Zombie shambled onto the stage and took a bite out of Dess's shoulder."
"Then" is not a conjunction, and cannot be used to bind sentences together-- it's an adverb describing time. Use "and then" if you want to keep "then" but have an actual conjunction.
Run-on sentences make you look unprofessional and they're a cinch to avoid.
Comma Splices
"Dess tried to escape the zombies, she was eaten instead."
A comma splice is the run-on sentence's slightly sneakier older brother. It consists of two sentences stuck together with a comma that should be separated by something else, such as a period, semicolon, or conjunction. In this case, adding a "but" after the comma will fix the sentence.
Comma splices aren't as bad as run-ons, but they're still distracting. Some people allow comma splices and run-ons within character dialogue on the grounds that their characters would be speaking that way, but there's no excuse for it in normal narration.
Homophone Errors
"To", "two", and "too" are homophones-- words that sound the same but are spelled differently. Homophone errors are worth paying attention to because a spellchecker won't catch 'em. If you're not sure, just ask a known grammar nazi. The chances of one of us knowing which one to use are very high.
Usually homophone errors just make you sound like you don't know English, but occasionally they can cause real confusion.
Forgotten Capitalization
If you don't capitalize the beginnings of your sentences, you look lazy. If you capitalize random words, you look like you're from the 15th century. If you don't capitalize "I", you look emo.
Apostrophes, Contractions, Possessives
A lot of people get these things wrong, so here's what's right:
* For words that aren't exceptions, use 's for possessive singular ("the cat's pajamas") and s' for possessive plural (the Largoists' festival).
* For non-plural words that naturally end in S such as "boss" use "-'s" for possessive singular. Use "-es" for plural. The boss's stock options are worthless. This game has awesome end bosses.
* To contract _____ is, use _____'s, always.
* It's = it is, or it has. Its = thing that belongs to it.
* Who's = who is. Whose = thing that belongs to whom
Commonly misused words
Lose is a verb, meaning to forget something. Loose is an adjective, meaning not tight.
Cannon is a piece of artillery. Canon is a set of writings that go together.
Clarity
Clarity is anything in your post that helps other people than you understand what is taking place in it.
Why Clarity is Good
Fundamentally, you want people to understand your post. There's no point to reading or writing something that carries no information. A post might have no substance and only style, and that's fine, but the style had better be clearly there, or it's pointless.
Unclear Pronouns
This is by far the biggest problem in terms of clarity. When I say, "she" in this paragraph, I know I'm referring to Dess, from an example sentence ten sections up. People reading this guide shouldn't have to make that guess, though. It's asking too much work, breaking up the flow of the narration, and introducing confusion.
Never start a paragraph with pronouns
A new paragraph should be considered a clean slate pronoun-wise. Even in dialogue where paragraphs are short, pronouns can become unclear. What if someone says something two paragraphs long? Assuming the speakers alternate breaks down there, so don't rely on that.
A pronoun always refers to the most recent noun before it that it can refer to
A pronoun can only refer to nouns that have the same gender and number as the noun-- "it" for things, "he" for males, "she" for females, "them" for plural entities. Thus if you have a male and a female speaking, you can use pronouns practically all the time, because it's obvious whom they refer to. On the other hand, with three people talking, the antecedents become less obvious.
"Dess walked up to Liseli. 'Have we met before?' she asked." Who's speaking? The official answer is Liseli is, because she's the most recent noun that could attach to "she". But honestly, do you really want to make the reader do that much work? Just put ", who asked" after Liseli to reduce confusion, or just say "Liseli asked" instead of "she asked". If it's awkward, rework it, but don't rely on pronouns to carry poor structure.
Vague Pronouns for Abstracts
"Dess always knew Andrew was secretly a ninja on some level, though she'd never spent much time thinking about this."
The question left with the reader is: "this what?" For pronouns such as "this" and "such" (and occasionally "it"), you need to clarify what the pronoun's referring to by changing the pronoun into an adjective, like so:
"Dess always knew Andrew was secretly a ninja on some level, though she'd never spent much time thinking about this secret."
Sometimes people avoid making the pronoun specific this way specifically to be vague. See the following section.
Deliberately Vague Writing
"The masked Villain said something secret. The other masked villain made a vague gesture and did something. Then the universe exploded."
A lot of us like to write vaguely. It can have its uses. Most of the time, however, it's just annoying. I'll try to look at the good and the bad of deliberate vagueness here.
The events being portrayed are unclear to the viewer
This happens most often in first-person and limitted-third-person narration styles. We don't want to give our characters more information than they have, so we write them vaguely. This can be very effective for making an enemy scarier than it might otherwise be.
"A dark shape slipped past the edge of my vision. A moment later, blistering pain blossomed on the back of my skull. Whatever had attacked me, it had nailed me dead on."
The trick is, it's the character that's vague, not the narration. The narration is still crystal clear, writing in five senses (this example uses vision and sensation). The sensory input isn't written vaguely, it's just that some is missing, and no conclusions are drawn. Compare to:
"I saw something. Something hit me. I fell down."
This conveys no less information, but it carries MUCH less punch, because the descriptions are less clear.
Secrets are being kept from the reader
This is most frequent in cases of evil councils of doom. People, instead of being named, are described by their costumes, or a pseudonym. They speak cryptically, usually in pronouns. "'Do you have it ready?' asked the man in the silver robes with yellow eyes."
While in small doses, this can be a fun treasure hunt for clues, in large amounts it gets REALLY tiring. So use it sparingly.
To give an air of mystery
This is most frequent when rituals of unholy badness are being performed. When written well, it can create curiosity. But usually it just leaves the reader confused and annoyed. Use the same guide as the events are unclear to the viewer-- show what's happening clearly, and simply keep the significance hidden, or keep some key elements of the ceremony obscured from view.
Good:
"Is the sacrifice ready?" Farallon asked his shambling unholy minions.
Grudgibern, Farallon's scar-studded master of ceremonies, bowed until his moldy beard scraped the dirty floor. "She is."
"Let me go!" the sacrifice screeched, clawing at the zombies holding her captive.
"Please, my sweet, be still," Farallon warned, and pointed his staff at the braided celtic knot drawn in blood on the floor. "If you were to disturb this rune, the consequences would be... dire."
The sacrifice stared at the pattern on the floor, her eyes growing wide. She knew that spell. She had to warn the others, or--
A moment later, a knife in her back, the sacrifice lay in the center of the knot.
"It is done," Grudgibern intoned solemnly.
Two facts are being deliberately concealed-- the purpose of the blood rune, and the fact that the sacrifice is in fact Dess, who has been abused throughout this page, poor girl. Everything else, including physical descriptions of people and places, is given in perfect detail.
Bad:
"Is the sacrifice ready?" Farallon asked.
Grudgibern bowed. "She is."
The sacrifice struggled, but the zombies wouldn't let it go.
"Please, my sweet, be still," Farallon warned. "If you were to disturb this rune, the consequences would be... dire."
Then Grudgibern stabbed her. The rune glowed.
"It is done," Grudgibern intoned solemnly.
You can't really see what's happening, or to whom. There's not enough to guess at here to be fun.
To preserve reader sensibilities
If you're vague about it, you can do all sorts of horrible things to characters in the thread, right?
Wrong. If it's not appropriate to the thread, don't put it there. Don't just make it vague-- that dilutes the punch of the horribleness, and some of us are smart enough to still see what's happening and be squicked. Plus for further plotting after, it's not clear what happened, which makes reacting hard.
Laziness
There's not much excuse for this. Write clearly or don't. There's no due date, and we're only reading and writing for our own enjoyment. Why not write well?
Give People Names
You'd be amazed what this does for a post. If you're being attacked by a bunch of thugs and have an extended fight scene, give them names. They may not last the post, but it'll be easier to tell them apart, and much less labored than having to remember which character had which distinguishing mark (or worse, no distinguishing marks). This is even more of an issue if you plan to reuse people. But even if you don't plan on reusing them, sometimes reuse happens.
Refresh Our Memory
Characters often refer to things that are clear to them but not clear to the reader. If something took place more than 10 posts ago, it helps to have a little sentence to help refresh the reader's knowledge about what's being referred to. Also, you should do a full recap once per thread, as generally 1-3 people join every thread.
A one-sentence reminder:
"So, any news about the ARC movement?" I asked Dess. She had been helping me keep tabs on them for some time because her intelligence had assets in that area.
A once-per-thread reminder:
My obsession with Andrew's new ARC friends had been growing for some time. I'd discovered their leader, Janus, had secreted himself in Andrew's head. I'd discovered they bound their own souls to that leader. I'd discovered from an informant that their stealth and mobility and numbers made them nigh-unstoppable. Still, I figured I had an advantage on them. Why? I knew about them, and they didn't yet know about me.
Who's Talking?
In conversation-heavy posts, it gets tempting to leave out all description. You get a series of paragraphs consisting only of dialogue. Don't give in to this-- it gets very easy to lose track of who's talking, and it also makes for a bland post as most of us don't write interesting enough dialogue to stand up on its own. It's simple to add a "Dess said," or "Liseli replied," to the ends or beginning of her lines. Even better, you can add some physical cues to the dialogue.
Examples:
"Really! You'll marry me?" Liseli asked, hopping excitedly.
Domovoi held his hands out to try to ward her off. "It was just an expression!" he protested.
A post with this kind of writing in the dialogue will spice up the dialogue. Because honestly, do people really just stand there and stay their lines? No! They do stuff when they're talking. They gesture. They point. They make and break eye contact. They change their vocal inflection. They continue the tasks they'd been working on. They fidget. They take their eyes off the road and plow into pedestrians after making eye contact for too long.
Other
These are easy steps you can take to improve post quality that don't fall into the above categories.
Use a spell checker
They're not perfect, but a spell checker can often point you towards areas of the post that have other errors. Googledocs has a free one. Firefox has a free one you can turn on. There are also free spelling websites online. However, a spellchecker is not sufficient for some types of errors, especially when you typo one word into something else that is also a word (I have a tendency to write "and" instead of "at", for instance). Also, most online grammar checkers suck horribly.
Search for Stray Characters
If you make posts by editting logs, you may end up with stray tags from the logs, including timestamps, quotes and people's screen names. A simple ctrl-f to search for these things before you post is never a bad idea and will save you editing time after the fact.
Take a Read Over
Reading over your post once from start to finish once you're done is a good way to catch most of the above errors. If this seems like too much work, considering that we all will be reading your post from start to finish as well. If it's too much work for you to bother with, what does that say about how enjoyable the post is to read for the rest of us?
Well, I hope you've found this guide instructive. Feel free to post comments or further questions, even if you're not assigned to me.
* 1 Basics
* 2 Paragraphing
* 3 Tags
~o 3.1 Required
~~+ 3.1.1 Summary
~o 3.2 Commonly Used
~~+ 3.2.1 Location
~~+ 3.2.2 Timestamp/Sequence
~~+ 3.2.3 Authors
~~+ 3.2.4 OOC/IC
~~+ 3.2.5 Narration
* 4 Common Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation Problems
~o 4.1 Consistent Tense and Voice
~~+ 4.1.1 Tense
~~+ 4.1.2 Voice
~o 4.2 Run-on Sentences
~o 4.3 Comma Splices
~o 4.4 Homophone Errors
~o 4.5 Forgotten Capitalization
~o 4.6 Apostrophes, Contractions, Possessives
~o 4.7 Commonly misused words
* 5 Clarity
~o 5.1 Why Clarity is Good
~o 5.2 Unclear Pronouns
~~+ 5.2.1 Never start a paragraph with pronouns
~~+ 5.2.2 A pronoun always refers to the most recent noun before it that it can refer to
~~+ 5.2.3 Vague Pronouns for Abstracts
~o 5.3 Deliberately Vague Writing
~~+ 5.3.1 The events being portrayed are unclear to the viewer
~~+ 5.3.2 Secrets are being kept from the reader
~~+ 5.3.3 To give an air of mystery
~~+ 5.3.4 To preserve reader sensibilities
~~+ 5.3.5 Laziness
~~+ 5.3.6 To make fun of any of the above
~o 5.4 Give People Names
~o 5.5 Refresh Our Memory
~o 5.6 Who's Talking?
* 6 Other
~o 6.1 Use a spell checker
~o 6.2 Search for Stray Characters
~o 6.3 Take a Read Over
Basics
This page exists to try to improve the style of everyone's writing by addressing a number of shallow, stylistic issues that should all take very little effort for individual authors to implement. Issues here have been picked because:
* They are commonly a problem
* They can be fixed easily
* The benefits strongly outweigh the effort required
I have tried to note which things are considered optional-- but even optional things should be done. The more you do, the easier your post is to read, the higher the percentage of the reader base will read them, the sooner they'll get read, the more people will want to write with you. You want people to read your stuff, right?
[Pessimism]Unfortunately, the people who are the worst probably won't read this.[/Pessimism]
Please fix anything here that's actively wrong. If you have other comments or opinions, the talk page is available.
Paragraphing
Paragraphing is nothing special-- the rules here are the same as the rules all over the internet. Each paragraph is separated from the paragraph above by a single empty line. No exceptions. No weird grouping of paragraphs by varying numbers of carriage returns for reasons known only to the author. While most novels indent their paragraphs, the HTML standard specifically does not indent paragraphs, and since the forums are rendered in the world wide web, they follow HTML's example.
This section is an example of good paragraphing.
Paragraphs should begin when a new person speaks, when the dialogue itself would have a paragraph, and when the general subject being described changes. If you want a section break that's stronger than a simple paragraph break, you should use something to indicate what kind of stronger break it is.
* "* * *" is often used to indicate the passage of time. An empty line precedes and follows this indication.
* "-----" is often used to indicate a change of place or point of view. An empty line precedes and follows this indication.
* " your stuff goes here " is often used to indicate the presence of a flashback, dream sequence, or other mental action. If you need to do italics inside the italicized section, just undo the italics, like so:
Dess lay in her bed, thinking about past events.
Dess did stuff in a flashback. Man, I hate flashbacks. But Dess didn't have to worry about the flashback for long.
Dess woke up from the flashback, feeling peeved that she'd been used as an example.
Tags
Tags are those little things in bold you often see in posts to give them more definition.
Required:
Summary
The only required tag is Summary. Summaries are there for a bunch of reasons.
* Summaries add clarity. When something wonky is happening in a post, it really helps to have a succint restatement of what happened.
* Summaries are a great place to be funny or in character.
* When someone summarizes a thread, they use the summaries to do it. Those summaries end up being the wiki articles. Thread summaries are created by reading post summaries. If you don't write a summary for your post, it probably won't end up in the thread summary, and thus not on the wiki.
* Summaries help people quickly locate old posts. "Man, when was that post where Ash fought Niwatori Chinou and got turned stupid?" Much easier to scan through summaries than posts.
* Some of us high-and-mighty types won't read posts that don't have summaries. You don't have the time to write one? That's nice, we don't have the time to read one. So don't omit the summary to get people to read your hard work. We won't. We'll do the opposite.
A particularly galling variant of this are people whose summaries consist of "read it". If you feel it shouldn't be summarized, don't include a summary tag. It's insulting.
Commonly Used
Location
Says where a post is taking place. Sometimes you don't want to take the time to write setting-- this is a nice way to cut to the chase.
Timestamp/Sequence
When we get back to hard-canon, these will become required again. It can be very hard to tell what's happening when. Timestamp helps people quickly sort this out without having to comb the post for temporal details like position of the sun, other recognizable events, and soforth.
Authors
Some people like credit for their work. When coposting, it's polite to include their names.
OOC/IC
Stands for Out of Character and In Character respectively. This is a nice way of showing what's you talking and what's your characters talking.
Narration
For those of us who like to write in first person, it's not always clear who's talking. This is an easy way to establish that "I" is in fact Dess, that sniper, and not Dom the Deadpan Snarker.
Common Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation Problems
These are all grammatical problems that have occurred in real posts. The examples used are made up to avoid singling people out, but if desired I could start culling real examples from the thread. They're all quite common. Having poor grammar in a post jars and distracts readers who are used to good grammar. They also make you seem less educated and intelligent. Too many in too small a place can make the meaning of what's happening unclear, or frustrate the reader out of reading the post.
Consistent Tense and Voice
Tense is when your verbs happen. Voice is who does them. Within any one section (for instance, the piece of a post that's not in a flashback), tense and voice should remain consistent throughout. Consistent does not mean the same thing as "constant", which is a big source of slipups.
Tense
Generally I always write in the past perfect tense. For those of you who didn't spend 5 years taking Latin, that means writing like this:
"Strauss ran up the stairs, slammed the door open, and was prompty devoured by zombies."
Use of -ed is the name of the game, when you're referring to things that are happening right there in the post.
When you're talking about stuff that happened before the post took place, you move to the pluperfect tense. In plainer English, that means writing like this:
"Strauss had gotten almost no sleep last night."
Finally, some people want to put immediacy in their posts to make it feel like it's happening right now. The present tense isn't the way to do this-- it just feels silly. What you should use is the past imperfect tense, which looks like the first half of this sentence (the second half is plain old past perfect):
"Strauss was dodging backwards when the anvil fell on him."
Proper use of tenses keeps it clear when things are happening, which can save a lot of confusion and frustration on the part of the readers. Also the present tense sounds really weird in this style of writing. Imagine reading a book written that way.
Voice
Voice in grammar just means what the subject of the verbs is. I'm going to assume that's relatively easy for people to keep consistent, though occasionally BozoCat messes up and flips between third person ("Ash ran down the hallway") and first person ("I ran down the hallway") within one post, which is a big no-no.
The other thing to consider with voice, on a more stylistic and less grammatical note, is the place the narrator sits. There are three kinds of third-person narrators that we care about.
* Third person, limitted to sensory. You don't get into people's heads or motivations, and just show what's happening. Sometimes, you only show what one character is perceiving. If you do this, make sure it's always the same character within a section. Paragraphs that show the perceptions of two different characters alternatingly are very jarring (this frequently happens in coposts).
* Third person, over-the-shoulder. You get into one character's head and motivations, and also show what's happening from their point of view. This is most common, with authors narrating their own characters' motivations. It's important not to slip in other people's motivations if the character whose shoulder you're looking over isn't aware of them (otherwise it'll feel like you're metagaming, i.e. using author knowledge in character). Sometimes the narrator may be unreliable. A good way to indicate thoughts and opinions as opposed to statements of fact is to use italics.
* Third person, omniscient. You write everyone's motivations. If using italics, be sure to add a tag of "he thought" or "she thought" afterwards to make it clear who's doing the thinking.
Consistent voice will strengthen your characterization, keep author and character knowledge separate, and keep it clear who's thinking what. Inconsistent voice makes it obvious that a post was written by two or more separate people, which is very distracting.
Run-on Sentences
"Bob the Remarkably Durable Zombie shambled onto the stage then took a bite out of Dess's shoulder."
A run-on sentence is two sentences (or very-close-to-sentences) that are not separated by anything when they should be separated by a period. The most common way I see these is with people using the word "then" as a conjuction. In other words, this sentence is fine while the above is a run-on:
"Bob the Remarkably Durable Zombie shambled onto the stage and took a bite out of Dess's shoulder."
"Then" is not a conjunction, and cannot be used to bind sentences together-- it's an adverb describing time. Use "and then" if you want to keep "then" but have an actual conjunction.
Run-on sentences make you look unprofessional and they're a cinch to avoid.
Comma Splices
"Dess tried to escape the zombies, she was eaten instead."
A comma splice is the run-on sentence's slightly sneakier older brother. It consists of two sentences stuck together with a comma that should be separated by something else, such as a period, semicolon, or conjunction. In this case, adding a "but" after the comma will fix the sentence.
Comma splices aren't as bad as run-ons, but they're still distracting. Some people allow comma splices and run-ons within character dialogue on the grounds that their characters would be speaking that way, but there's no excuse for it in normal narration.
Homophone Errors
"To", "two", and "too" are homophones-- words that sound the same but are spelled differently. Homophone errors are worth paying attention to because a spellchecker won't catch 'em. If you're not sure, just ask a known grammar nazi. The chances of one of us knowing which one to use are very high.
Usually homophone errors just make you sound like you don't know English, but occasionally they can cause real confusion.
Forgotten Capitalization
If you don't capitalize the beginnings of your sentences, you look lazy. If you capitalize random words, you look like you're from the 15th century. If you don't capitalize "I", you look emo.
Apostrophes, Contractions, Possessives
A lot of people get these things wrong, so here's what's right:
* For words that aren't exceptions, use 's for possessive singular ("the cat's pajamas") and s' for possessive plural (the Largoists' festival).
* For non-plural words that naturally end in S such as "boss" use "-'s" for possessive singular. Use "-es" for plural. The boss's stock options are worthless. This game has awesome end bosses.
* To contract _____ is, use _____'s, always.
* It's = it is, or it has. Its = thing that belongs to it.
* Who's = who is. Whose = thing that belongs to whom
Commonly misused words
Lose is a verb, meaning to forget something. Loose is an adjective, meaning not tight.
Cannon is a piece of artillery. Canon is a set of writings that go together.
Clarity
Clarity is anything in your post that helps other people than you understand what is taking place in it.
Why Clarity is Good
Fundamentally, you want people to understand your post. There's no point to reading or writing something that carries no information. A post might have no substance and only style, and that's fine, but the style had better be clearly there, or it's pointless.
Unclear Pronouns
This is by far the biggest problem in terms of clarity. When I say, "she" in this paragraph, I know I'm referring to Dess, from an example sentence ten sections up. People reading this guide shouldn't have to make that guess, though. It's asking too much work, breaking up the flow of the narration, and introducing confusion.
Never start a paragraph with pronouns
A new paragraph should be considered a clean slate pronoun-wise. Even in dialogue where paragraphs are short, pronouns can become unclear. What if someone says something two paragraphs long? Assuming the speakers alternate breaks down there, so don't rely on that.
A pronoun always refers to the most recent noun before it that it can refer to
A pronoun can only refer to nouns that have the same gender and number as the noun-- "it" for things, "he" for males, "she" for females, "them" for plural entities. Thus if you have a male and a female speaking, you can use pronouns practically all the time, because it's obvious whom they refer to. On the other hand, with three people talking, the antecedents become less obvious.
"Dess walked up to Liseli. 'Have we met before?' she asked." Who's speaking? The official answer is Liseli is, because she's the most recent noun that could attach to "she". But honestly, do you really want to make the reader do that much work? Just put ", who asked" after Liseli to reduce confusion, or just say "Liseli asked" instead of "she asked". If it's awkward, rework it, but don't rely on pronouns to carry poor structure.
Vague Pronouns for Abstracts
"Dess always knew Andrew was secretly a ninja on some level, though she'd never spent much time thinking about this."
The question left with the reader is: "this what?" For pronouns such as "this" and "such" (and occasionally "it"), you need to clarify what the pronoun's referring to by changing the pronoun into an adjective, like so:
"Dess always knew Andrew was secretly a ninja on some level, though she'd never spent much time thinking about this secret."
Sometimes people avoid making the pronoun specific this way specifically to be vague. See the following section.
Deliberately Vague Writing
"The masked Villain said something secret. The other masked villain made a vague gesture and did something. Then the universe exploded."
A lot of us like to write vaguely. It can have its uses. Most of the time, however, it's just annoying. I'll try to look at the good and the bad of deliberate vagueness here.
The events being portrayed are unclear to the viewer
This happens most often in first-person and limitted-third-person narration styles. We don't want to give our characters more information than they have, so we write them vaguely. This can be very effective for making an enemy scarier than it might otherwise be.
"A dark shape slipped past the edge of my vision. A moment later, blistering pain blossomed on the back of my skull. Whatever had attacked me, it had nailed me dead on."
The trick is, it's the character that's vague, not the narration. The narration is still crystal clear, writing in five senses (this example uses vision and sensation). The sensory input isn't written vaguely, it's just that some is missing, and no conclusions are drawn. Compare to:
"I saw something. Something hit me. I fell down."
This conveys no less information, but it carries MUCH less punch, because the descriptions are less clear.
Secrets are being kept from the reader
This is most frequent in cases of evil councils of doom. People, instead of being named, are described by their costumes, or a pseudonym. They speak cryptically, usually in pronouns. "'Do you have it ready?' asked the man in the silver robes with yellow eyes."
While in small doses, this can be a fun treasure hunt for clues, in large amounts it gets REALLY tiring. So use it sparingly.
To give an air of mystery
This is most frequent when rituals of unholy badness are being performed. When written well, it can create curiosity. But usually it just leaves the reader confused and annoyed. Use the same guide as the events are unclear to the viewer-- show what's happening clearly, and simply keep the significance hidden, or keep some key elements of the ceremony obscured from view.
Good:
"Is the sacrifice ready?" Farallon asked his shambling unholy minions.
Grudgibern, Farallon's scar-studded master of ceremonies, bowed until his moldy beard scraped the dirty floor. "She is."
"Let me go!" the sacrifice screeched, clawing at the zombies holding her captive.
"Please, my sweet, be still," Farallon warned, and pointed his staff at the braided celtic knot drawn in blood on the floor. "If you were to disturb this rune, the consequences would be... dire."
The sacrifice stared at the pattern on the floor, her eyes growing wide. She knew that spell. She had to warn the others, or--
A moment later, a knife in her back, the sacrifice lay in the center of the knot.
"It is done," Grudgibern intoned solemnly.
Two facts are being deliberately concealed-- the purpose of the blood rune, and the fact that the sacrifice is in fact Dess, who has been abused throughout this page, poor girl. Everything else, including physical descriptions of people and places, is given in perfect detail.
Bad:
"Is the sacrifice ready?" Farallon asked.
Grudgibern bowed. "She is."
The sacrifice struggled, but the zombies wouldn't let it go.
"Please, my sweet, be still," Farallon warned. "If you were to disturb this rune, the consequences would be... dire."
Then Grudgibern stabbed her. The rune glowed.
"It is done," Grudgibern intoned solemnly.
You can't really see what's happening, or to whom. There's not enough to guess at here to be fun.
To preserve reader sensibilities
If you're vague about it, you can do all sorts of horrible things to characters in the thread, right?
Wrong. If it's not appropriate to the thread, don't put it there. Don't just make it vague-- that dilutes the punch of the horribleness, and some of us are smart enough to still see what's happening and be squicked. Plus for further plotting after, it's not clear what happened, which makes reacting hard.
Laziness
There's not much excuse for this. Write clearly or don't. There's no due date, and we're only reading and writing for our own enjoyment. Why not write well?
Give People Names
You'd be amazed what this does for a post. If you're being attacked by a bunch of thugs and have an extended fight scene, give them names. They may not last the post, but it'll be easier to tell them apart, and much less labored than having to remember which character had which distinguishing mark (or worse, no distinguishing marks). This is even more of an issue if you plan to reuse people. But even if you don't plan on reusing them, sometimes reuse happens.
Refresh Our Memory
Characters often refer to things that are clear to them but not clear to the reader. If something took place more than 10 posts ago, it helps to have a little sentence to help refresh the reader's knowledge about what's being referred to. Also, you should do a full recap once per thread, as generally 1-3 people join every thread.
A one-sentence reminder:
"So, any news about the ARC movement?" I asked Dess. She had been helping me keep tabs on them for some time because her intelligence had assets in that area.
A once-per-thread reminder:
My obsession with Andrew's new ARC friends had been growing for some time. I'd discovered their leader, Janus, had secreted himself in Andrew's head. I'd discovered they bound their own souls to that leader. I'd discovered from an informant that their stealth and mobility and numbers made them nigh-unstoppable. Still, I figured I had an advantage on them. Why? I knew about them, and they didn't yet know about me.
Who's Talking?
In conversation-heavy posts, it gets tempting to leave out all description. You get a series of paragraphs consisting only of dialogue. Don't give in to this-- it gets very easy to lose track of who's talking, and it also makes for a bland post as most of us don't write interesting enough dialogue to stand up on its own. It's simple to add a "Dess said," or "Liseli replied," to the ends or beginning of her lines. Even better, you can add some physical cues to the dialogue.
Examples:
"Really! You'll marry me?" Liseli asked, hopping excitedly.
Domovoi held his hands out to try to ward her off. "It was just an expression!" he protested.
A post with this kind of writing in the dialogue will spice up the dialogue. Because honestly, do people really just stand there and stay their lines? No! They do stuff when they're talking. They gesture. They point. They make and break eye contact. They change their vocal inflection. They continue the tasks they'd been working on. They fidget. They take their eyes off the road and plow into pedestrians after making eye contact for too long.
Other
These are easy steps you can take to improve post quality that don't fall into the above categories.
Use a spell checker
They're not perfect, but a spell checker can often point you towards areas of the post that have other errors. Googledocs has a free one. Firefox has a free one you can turn on. There are also free spelling websites online. However, a spellchecker is not sufficient for some types of errors, especially when you typo one word into something else that is also a word (I have a tendency to write "and" instead of "at", for instance). Also, most online grammar checkers suck horribly.
Search for Stray Characters
If you make posts by editting logs, you may end up with stray tags from the logs, including timestamps, quotes and people's screen names. A simple ctrl-f to search for these things before you post is never a bad idea and will save you editing time after the fact.
Take a Read Over
Reading over your post once from start to finish once you're done is a good way to catch most of the above errors. If this seems like too much work, considering that we all will be reading your post from start to finish as well. If it's too much work for you to bother with, what does that say about how enjoyable the post is to read for the rest of us?
Well, I hope you've found this guide instructive. Feel free to post comments or further questions, even if you're not assigned to me.