A summary should work like a TV show logline. It should tease your plot, and give folks enough info to decide if they'd like to read it. Since only a percentage of fan fiction is romance, I ignore stuff like listing pairings--and if you want to put in some indication of why you wrote a story, that's what author's notes are for. With a summary, as a reader all I am looking for is the gist of your plot, and maybe the MPAA-style rating, so I have a clue as to the content. But anything else? Detracts. Totally unnecessary.

Would of / would have:
Easy. If you're trying to write the way people talk, use "would've."

A harder one is "a whole nother." It's total nonsense, but people say it all the time, so sometimes you have to write it. Another is "persons" vs. "people." 99% of the time, "persons" is correct, since "people" is only supposed to refer to cultural groups, as in "the American people." Any group of individuals, say the gang on "That 70s Show," ought to be refered to as "persons," but who would ever say that?

Huh. I never knew what the real difference between people/persons was. That's interesting. I've just always used people, because I've never really seen it written as persons.

Here is what I found regarding the definition of people:

1 plural : human beings making up a group or assembly or linked by a common interest
2 plural : HUMAN BEINGS, PERSONS -- often used in compounds instead of persons <salespeople>
3 plural : the members of a family or kinship
4 plural : the mass of a community as distinguished from a special class <disputes between the people and the nobles> -- often used by Communists to distinguish Communists from other people
5 plural peoples : a body of persons that are united by a common culture, tradition, or sense of kinship, that typically have common language, institutions, and beliefs, and that often constitute a politically organized group
6 : lower animals usually of a specified kind or situation
7 : the body of enfranchised citizens of a state

The first definition listed above seems, to me at least, to include the That 70's Show gang. But I majored in accounting, not English.

I don't get what this persons/people thing is about. How do you use the word in context of a fic anyway? Would a run of the mill fanfic reader really notice that you used 'people' instead of 'persons'?

That sort of brings me to the next subject, which is half to do with good characterisation and half to do with proper grammar. I absolutely hate it when an intellectual character's dialogue is written with bad grammar and general ignorance. You'd expect people like Giles or Wesley to know the difference between words like 'who' and 'whom', use them correctly, and even correct other people who do it wrong. Of course, it's hardly the author's intention to make the character's dialogue fault-ridden, it could be that they, for lack of a better expression, don't know better. A little research would help, though.

In this vein, I also hate when authors unwittingly make their intellectual characters seem inexperienced in their field. I can't really explain this properly, so I'll use an example. In one fic I read, this highly intelligent, very well qualified English teacher said that her favourite Shakespeare play of all time was Romeo and Juliet. I'm no English major, but even in my three years in high school learning Shakespeare, I know that R&J was one of Shakespeare's more juvenile works. It's not one of the four great tragedies, the writing was done in rhyming couplets most of the time, the themes are not as deep or well thought-out as are, for example, King Lear or Hamlet. You can try and justify the English teacher's preference by saying that everyone has different tastes, et cetera; but surely a woman of her calibre would know the difference between a truly meaty Shakespearean play, and one that was pretty much a warm-up to the finer, grander plays. To me, it seemed like the author was trying to make her intellectual characters talk Shakespeare to build up their teacherly characterisation, but at the same time you could see she didn't quite know what she was on about, so that really irked me.

[ 12-21-2003: Message edited Silversun ]

Personally, I rely a lot (probably too much) on MSWord’s spelling auto-correct and the red and green squiggly lines. They don’t fix everything, though. Today I found a couple of typos that made it past all my checking and rechecking (drat, maybe I do need a beta reader). I also keep a basic reference set (dictionary, thesaurus and spelling dictionary) within easy reach. I’ve also got a writer’s handbook, book of quotes and almanac (though it’s totally out of date) that I glance through on occasion.

Regarding authors making their intellectual characters seem inexperienced, I totally agree. I’ve also seen activities and events described in totally unreal terms. Part of it may be regional or cultural differences, but some of it has got to be people trying to write about something with which they have had no experience. Hospital scenes are a prime example. So far, I’ve tried to keep my stories within my meager realm of knowledge. Hopefully on the occasions when I’ve ventured outside those limits, I’ve not guessed too badly (I’ve purposely kept those items vague to hide my lack of knowledge – is that cheating? [img]smilies/look.gif[/img] ). I have done minor research regarding roads and locations in Connecticut since my chosen fandom is Gilmore Girls, but that’s easily accomplished on the internet. And I’ve made many trips to the video store to catch up on pop culture lately, though I doubt I’ll ever reach the level of Lorelai and Rory.

[ 12-21-2003: Message edited dukesmom ]

I have been running into something for some months now that is driving me insane!!!

People cannot seem to spell "definitely".

You know what they end up writing? "Defiantly".

Now there are two words with meanings that are totally not related. This drives me insane.

Also when people don't spell characters names right. I remember this guy who was writing Buffy fic spelling Xander as Zander. I wrote in with FB and also mentioned that was the wrong spelling. He informed me it was correct and he knew because that was his little boys name. I have no idea what happened to that story as I stopped reading it. Things like that will make me stop a story.

I mean, if you're going to write a story about Ginny Weasley you should know how to spell her freaking name!!! I read a fic the other day where it was spelled Weasely. The author fixed it around chapter 7 and started spelling correctly but she never went back to the previous chapters to fix it. I am glad I read it though because it turned out to be a good story and the mistake wasn't in so many places that it could turn me off like reading a fic with Lucious could. :shudders at the blatant mauling of Lucius' name:

It's like fingernails on a chalkboard. Online.

Misspelling character names is a big no no. Unfortunately it's also quite common because how many fanfic characters can you name that has a 'regular' name? Xander, Lorelai, Pacey, Aragorn... ooh, I just realised all the main cast of Roswell have regular names. Go them. [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

Ugh, 'definately' is the worst. You know what I also really, really hate? Writting. As in "I'm writting a new story and I think its pretty good. Please feed back and Ill think about writting some more." [img]smilies/furious.gif[/img] Honey, hate to break it to you but you're never going to be a good 'writter' if you don't fix that goddamn spelling first!

There is really no excuse for misspelling a major character’s name. If you’re posting fanfiction on the internet, you have access to both official and unofficial websites dedicated to your fandom that you can use as a reference. Outside of the internet, there are numerous printed sources – newspapers, magazines, books, billboards and other advertising – that will have the names spelled correctly. For difficult or unusual names, all you have to do is add it to your word processor’s spelling dictionary and you should never misspell it again.

In all honesty, we could probably open a thread dedicated to the misuse of words. From simple typos (her instead of here), to homonym mix-ups (there/their/they’re) to outright screw-ups (defiantly instead of definitely). No one is immune from these types of mistakes. I’ve made my share and I’ve read professionally published books with errors as well. Some are annoying and others are downright hilarious.

re: the Roswell characters... Sure, Isabel is a "regular" name, but I've seen it spelled a million different ways in fic! [img]smilies/lol.gif[/img] The mispelled name I really love from Roswell, though, is Micheal. I think (hope?) that most of the people making that mistake did not speak/write English fluently, but still.

And yes, for heaven's sake, do some research if you're going to write about a topic you don't know much about! I think I must have spent hours pestering everyone I know about cars when I first started writing my TFATF epic. "What *is* an intercooler, anyway???"

Canon or AU? How far do you have to stray from canon to be called AU? How much unknown history can you fill in without being labeled AU, or does that even count as AU?

I’m pretty much a canon person. I can accept AU if it’s stated up front, though I will read those last. The same voice that screams at me when a movie strays too far from the book (The Bourne Identity) also screams at me when I read a fanfic not labeled as AU that portrays 2 characters meeting YEARS before what has been established on the television show for which it is based.

Newest pet peeve: if your summary is chapter specific, change it when you add a new chapter. I see it all too often where a story is on chapter 8 but the summary still talks about what happened in chapter 4.

Second newest pet peeve: the story’s rating is based on the chapter with the highest rating (i.e. if chapter 5 is R, then the entire story is R). You cannot go down in rating unless it was rated wrong to begin with or you’ve made changes to existing chapters to make their ratings go down. I’ve recently seen a couple of stories whose ratings go up and down based on individual chapters.

[ 12-26-2003: Message edited dukesmom ]

I should learn to check back on discussions I consider myself being involved in [img]smilies/headslap.gif[/img].

I see your point - a friend who has Hebrew as her first language actually said something quite similar about this, IIRC. Now, I don't know either Chinese or Hebrew in any way (would like to, though) - so I might be wrong here, but I'm guessing that in cases where the languages are as different as Chinese, Hebrew and English, you might not get the feeling I do from writing in another language.

My language(s) is/are Swedish and then Finnish - I don't speak Finnish very well but as it's the country's first language I still feel better in it than in English ('feel' as in feeling emotions, not being comfortable using it - I definetely prefer English there [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img])

For me words with big emotions in them, like 'love', 'hate' and so on, kind of loose their feel in English (and any other language that's not mine, of course) - 'love' as a word doesn't do anything for me, but the same word expressed in Swedish/Finnish holds a lot more emotions. (Now 'love' is pretty overused in English too, so that might have something to do with it...)
What freaks me out with this is that I can write a sentence like "I hate you/love you!" in English without feeling the words (i.e feeling the weigth/heavyness of them), but if I wrote/said them in one of my languages they'd mean a lot more. As a writer I don't like this b/c I get afraid of my stories loosing emotions because *I* don't feel them very well when I write. [img]smilies/look.gif[/img]

To this I can add that I haven't written anything decent in Swedish since last December - a serious problem for me that is entirely caused by my English writing and everything else I do in English these days. I have started to loose the words themselves in my language, and that is scary [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

I very much agree on English being a broad language, though. It also has words that I love but just can't find in Swedish/Finnish - one of these words is 'gently'; surely there is a translation but I just can't make myself like it. There are millions of similar words, words that describe feelings, that I never find in other languages - this makes my whole problem with not feeling feelings in English sound very weird, but if I understand myself correctly [ [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]], the amount of good words in English and lack of good translations really IS the problem. Or something. [img]smilies/rolleyes.gif[/img]

Totally OT, but I think that Finnish and Chinese might be a bit alike in the way very few letters/words can say something very big - I like that a lot, unfortunately that is what makes the language so darn difficult to learn [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

I think you can fill in as much unknown history as you like without it being Alternate Universe, unless the backstory means canon would have turned out differently. As far as I'm concerned, characters x and y could have met before the canon timeline, had a big romantic affair and babies and whatnot, and then both got abducted by aliens and conveniently got their memories of the years with each other replaced by memories of the same years without each other; and it would still be just a backstory, not necessarily AU, although my example was pretty far-fetched. [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img] As long as a story can co-exist with canon without it raising too many 'but what happened to...?' questions, I don't think of it as AU.

A lot of authors like to take a storyline away from canon at a certain point, and I enjoy that type of AU more than a 'backstory' type AU. A good example is Buffy post-The Gift, because there's such an obvious split between what happened before and what could have happened later. If the story is written well, I quite like reading them. AUs are fascinating. Although, a lot of the AU fics I read inevitably meant that a whole slew of original characters get introduced, so the success of the fic depends a lot on how well the author pulls off a whole bunch of OC characterisation in one go.

The big thing that bugged me with Roswell AUs was that quite often there wouldn't be any aliens involved in the fic at all! It was just like Dawson's Creek or something with character names from Roswell.

With that said, though, I have read some really good AUs - one of my favorites is Elizabeth's Persephone's Footfalls.

This is exactly why I think all writers, fan fic or otherwise, need to become experts on grammar. Sure, you can use casual grammar for a character like Buffy, but you can't write Giles without knowing precisely what the proper grammar is. Giles would never confuse "who" with "whom," not in a million years. Neither would Lucius Malfoy or Minerva McGonagall. Nor would any of the Elf characters in LotR, although Sam would.

Yesterday I beta-read one where the PRINCIPAL CHARACTER'S name was spelled wrong. Egads. [img]smilies/headslap.gif[/img]