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Derailing your critiquers with typos
AudryT
Posted: Sunday, April 3, 2011 4:01 AM
Joined: 3/4/2011
Posts: 15


Just wanted to put this out there -- IMO, the biggest favor you can do your WIP is to give it a thorough, manual spell-check before posting it here.  If your work is riddled with typos, critiquers will keep getting derailed by wrong words, non-words, and misspellings, which will keep them from being able to focus on those things that critiquers can help you with most (such as plot, pacing, character development, and so on).

Even if you are posting a rough draft of something you wrote five minutes ago, always, ALWAYS do a thorough spell-check (with your own eyeballs, not just with a crutch like an auto spell-checking program) before sharing it with others, especially if you're hoping to get feedback from them. 

(I say this because I keep running into work with numerous and easily noticed typos in the Books section.)

RJBlain
Posted: Tuesday, April 19, 2011 7:14 PM
Joined: 3/13/2011
Posts: 222


Heh, I think its also important to realize most of us threw something -- anything -- up to test the functionality of the site. (This is somewhat the case with me... I wanted to test the site so I did little more than a visual scan of my writing and plunked it online. (Also the reason why each piece only has one chapter...)

Not sure about everyone else, but I'll be replacing / taking down both of my test pieces as the site gets closer to full public.
Taylor Anne Prescott
Posted: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 12:28 AM
I agree with this. Though I understand that many pieces up here are in the draft stage, an abundance of typos and grammatical errors do not serve any hopeful writer well.

For me (and this is just a personal thought), if one cannot take the time to look for glaring errors, then perhaps they don't take as much pride in their work as they would like others to believe.

This is not to say that work must be flawless, because that would be expecting the ludicrous. I'm just saying that there should be a visible effort when it comes to work presented in any public forum.