If you whine about it, they will come
Nov. 12th, 2003 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynA while ago, on my one-year anniversary of this journal, and the weekend of Beta Appreciation Day, I whined about how no one ever asked me to beta/edit their fic. And lo, a bunch of goofy people let me read their stuff, and didn't even write back and tell me what a ruthless rev marks bitch I was! It was fun, and I got to know quite a few more people than I'd really known before, since most of our contact was tangential through LJ.
And a couple people asked me how I knew all this weird language stuff, and how come they'd never been taught those things or heard about that info. Off and on, over the years I've been writing fanfic, I've had people ask me to put up a tips and advice section on my web page, or use the LJ to give people a bigger picture of what makes reel gud writin. And I always resisted because a) there's tons of fan-oriented grammar do's and don'ts out there (which, sadly, often include a lot of wrong advice), b) people who aren't inclined to learn anything about language aren't going to care, and c) a lot of the folks who are beta-ing or writing feel like they know enough and that prissy prescriptive rules aren't of interest.
This time, though, the people who asked me were more persistent about it, and ... I dunno. I'm so depressed right now, maybe doing something different here would be fun. However, I wouldn't want to do a Miss Thistlebottom explains it all for you -- to me, the only value of talking about language and rules and all is to focus on stuff like exploding myths about those rules, or explaining why some of the things we've been taught in school aren't necessarily correct. Over the 20 years of editing, I've grown way less fussy about language -- I've learned so much that the whole "that's wrong and cannot be used that way" thought process isn't realistic, anyway. I'm constantly telling people in my class about getting into editing to lighten up -- every session, there are folks who brag about how they fix this and that, and I have to smile and say, well, it's not always what you think it is.
So, I'm still not convinced it would be of any value. But if you think something like an occasional post about why there are such wide variances on the use of s' or s's, or what the hell is a dangling modifier, anyway, and why can't I use one?, or the mysteries of quotation marks, would be of even the tiniest interest, let me know. At this point I feel like it would just make me seem more pedantic than I already do, which is pretty much, but I'm game if others are.
And a couple people asked me how I knew all this weird language stuff, and how come they'd never been taught those things or heard about that info. Off and on, over the years I've been writing fanfic, I've had people ask me to put up a tips and advice section on my web page, or use the LJ to give people a bigger picture of what makes reel gud writin. And I always resisted because a) there's tons of fan-oriented grammar do's and don'ts out there (which, sadly, often include a lot of wrong advice), b) people who aren't inclined to learn anything about language aren't going to care, and c) a lot of the folks who are beta-ing or writing feel like they know enough and that prissy prescriptive rules aren't of interest.
This time, though, the people who asked me were more persistent about it, and ... I dunno. I'm so depressed right now, maybe doing something different here would be fun. However, I wouldn't want to do a Miss Thistlebottom explains it all for you -- to me, the only value of talking about language and rules and all is to focus on stuff like exploding myths about those rules, or explaining why some of the things we've been taught in school aren't necessarily correct. Over the 20 years of editing, I've grown way less fussy about language -- I've learned so much that the whole "that's wrong and cannot be used that way" thought process isn't realistic, anyway. I'm constantly telling people in my class about getting into editing to lighten up -- every session, there are folks who brag about how they fix this and that, and I have to smile and say, well, it's not always what you think it is.
So, I'm still not convinced it would be of any value. But if you think something like an occasional post about why there are such wide variances on the use of s' or s's, or what the hell is a dangling modifier, anyway, and why can't I use one?, or the mysteries of quotation marks, would be of even the tiniest interest, let me know. At this point I feel like it would just make me seem more pedantic than I already do, which is pretty much, but I'm game if others are.
