Info for FF moderators and writers. (sort of Humour)

[psychic_serpent]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, udder_pen_dragon 
<udderpd at y...> wrote:
>                         Eye halve run this poem threw it,
>                         I am shore your pleased two no.
>                         Its letter perfect awl the weigh,
>                         my chequer tolled me sew.
> 
>                         Sauce unknown.
> 
> This I now dedicate to all Fiction Alley Moderators who believe 
> that a comma is more important than the story or the meaning of 
> words.

A few points:

1) Thanks for pointing out that you cannot rely upon a spell checker 
(or "chequer") to eliminate misspellings from writing.  If you use 
the wrong word but something that is still a word a spell checker 
will not catch it.  At FA we get people all of the time who are 
flagged for having too many spelling errors and say, "But I ran it 
through a spell checker!"

2) You'll notice that in the quoted section above another error that 
was (hopefully) purposefully included was the wrong version 
of "its."  This is one of the FA Unforgivable Errors, chiefly 
because we have found that authors who make errors with apostrophes 
tend to do so all through their submissions and we felt it was an 
onerous chore for fic screeners to have to wade through the entire 
thing to count all of the apostrophe errors.  

This is also why we only base the number of allowable errors in a 
submission on its length up to a point; the length may mean that 
more than thirty errors COULD be allowed but we feel that it is also 
onerous to force screeners to count up more than thirty errors in 
any one file and have made that our error cap, regardless of length.

3) Commas are very, very important, especially in dialogue 
punctuation.  Correctly capitalizing or not capitalizing the text 
adjacent to the dialogue is also important, as well as using an 
appropriate verb to describe the act of speech.  //"Please come in," 
she stepped back to allow them to enter.//  This is not correct.  A 
sentence containing a quote must have a subject (speaker), speaking 
verb and object (the quote itself).  This is akin to writing //She 
yelled her food.//  The verb and object simply do not match.  (So, 
you see, we DO believe that the meaning of words is important.)  If 
you are unwilling to correctly format your dialogue, even though you 
are writing for fun, please start your own archive; do not put 
people through reading such stuff--which is NOT fun--unless they 
make the mistake of going to your personal archive.

4) At FA the story is the last thing we find to be important since 
we do not judge anyone's actual plotting, charactization, etc.  As 
Heidi noted this would be far too subjective.  We do require 
something to tie a work to the Potterverse (since it is a Harry 
Potter archive) but we also allow virtually anything if a fic is 
labeled an AU (alternate universe).  Trust me, you really wouldn't 
want us judging plots and other content-based elements of our 
submissions.  Everyone has a different idea about what would be an 
acceptable submission; we use the most objective criteria possible 
to screen submissions but do not require perfection--just 
competence.  

As mentioned, there is an "allowable" error count for all 
submissions based on length, and when a submission is rather long we 
allow a maximum of thirty errors.  This means that a longish 
submission with twenty-eight errors will be uploaded as long as none 
are Unforgivables, so you WILL see fics with errors on the site. We 
do not claim otherwise.  This still means that a great deal of 
material is rejected for not meeting these standards, which are 
hardly draconian.  If you believe that you are writing a better 
story, as far as content, than the great unwashed masses, then you 
should also move yourself to put your story's best foot forward in 
terms of the "window dressing."  Don't expect someone to "look past" 
egregious errors to find your fabulous story; that is unfair and 
unreasonable.

5) A woman in Columbus, Ohio had a disagreement with the 
owner/manager of a local boutique (she was not permitted to return 
an item without a receipt) and so she wrote to the New York Times 
about it. Actually, that didn't happen, but that is analagous to 
your having a problem with the standards at FA and posting here 
about it.  You are free to vent, of course, as is anyone (we have 
never attempted to quash dissent), but it is still odd to do it in 
this venue and does not reflect well on you, since you are by 
implication revealing to quite a lot of people that you were 
evidently incapable of adhering to some really very reasonable and 
simple submission standards.

6) A few good beta readers could help you a great deal and I highly 
recommend that you look for some if you do not feel up to doing your 
own dialogue formatting.  I use about six beta readers, two of which 
do Britpicking.  The importance of other eyes cannot ever be 
discounted.  

Best of luck,

Barb (not speaking for FA Mods)