[Una]

[Viv]

[Moralanqua]

Now, Viv - there is no need to bristle. I was not attacking any American's patriotic sensibilities on purpose. I didnt want to name names (that would be mean) You are most certainly not on my peeved off list. Just some of your younger counterparts.

I base my opinion on experience. I can honestly say that i DO read the author profiles either before or just after i have read chappie one. If im on a personal website, i read whatever the author has included or maybe a piece from an LJ. By doing this, i can tell if im about to read something dire written by a teeny bopper. Point being to avoid reading on and feeling let down.

I have read hundreds and hundreds of fictions from FF.net and from personal websites (including most of the authors on this site). I have a file full of bookmarked fics i find are beyond fantastic. Fictions that are so good im straining at the bit for more. Then again, there are many many that are regurgitated trash (in terms of prose - an original idea can never be called trash)

And in my opinion - the majority that i find irksome are written by american authors. Granted a good deal of them are admitted teenagers, i feel they can be excused. I should have known better and they haven't even finished school in many cases. However, i have also read many from authors who demographically admit to being over 16.

I feel i can't make excuses for these particular authors striking my pet peeves. Afterall, its not to their faults that i hate colloqialisms in a fiction. Many readers do not mind and even enjoy the ease of verse this lends them.

Una - i have rarely read a Tolkien fic (good or bad) from a British author, they are in the minority. This also leads me to believe my opinion is skewed towards the American demographic because other nationalities just aren't writing as much.

This opinion is applicable to Tolkien fanfic only - other fandoms have an adundance of awfulness too. (LJ Smith is where you'll find the poorly written fics where Brits offend, also anime.)


(Please also note - im Scottish and find being termed British makes me Bristle )

[sindohte]

I blame the poor quality of writing on a number of different things. Roisin's point about the American public education system is true to a certain extent. So much time is spent on making sure the children are able to pass the yearly standardized tests, that not enough time is spent on simply allowing kids to be creative writers, just for the sheer pleasure of writing.

At the same time, Viv makes a good point about the age of a writer. I still have a story from when I was around ten about two of my Barbie dolls locking up Ken in his room, so they could go out to a party. Hopefully I have gotten way beyond that low point of my writing career and can actually come up with a better plot and other characters besides two pieces of molded plastic ganging up on a third piece of plastic.

As a general rule, a thirteen year old is not going to be as polished a writer as a twentysomething year old. This is due in part to amount of education, life experience, etc., etc., But at the same time, I have found that it is possible to spot a young author who is going to develop into a great writer as they get older. What I notice about the work of these young writers is that when you look past grammatical or spelling errors, they have a unique voice and a sense of creativity which allows them to shape a story into a new direction that surprises you.

One trend which I have noticed (and is a fanfic peeve of mine) is that some younger authors refer to movies during the course of their story to provide the setting for their story. I once encountered a story where the author had made the following type of author notations - This scene is like the cornfield scene from the movie Signs. This seemed like an incredibly lazy and utterly non-creative way of writing. My first problem is that I have never seen the movie, so I have no clue as to what image I am supposed to visualize as I read the story. The other problem I have is that the writer is telling and not showing the reader what is happening (Thanks Roisin for hammering that lesson into my head ).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I am willing to wince quietly about some grammatical or typing errors. However, I abhor a lack of creativity. Finding good, quality fanfiction is difficult because thanks to the power of the Internet, both hidden gems and dreck are thrown out into cyberspace. The gentle reader is then left with the unenviable task of sorting through masses of fanfiction to discover a budding Jane Austen or some howler of fanfic that is so bad, that it must have been written by a monkey on crack.

[Moralanqua]

Then there are those who do that spazzy writing:

"OMG lik u r sooo sxy Leg0la3! 1t wud b sooo kewl 2b ur girlf"

what is that?? Why?!!

[Una]

LuckyObsidian, that is supposed 3 B cewl netspeak <lol>

Netspeak is unfortunately coming more and more to the surface, not only because of the internet but because of short message services via the cell phones most younger folks are so fond of (I DO have a cell phone but ... even if my life depended on it I have no clue as how to send an SMS and I really do not want to know, it's already annoying that my students have those little devices from hell)

Additionally, LuckyObsidian wrote:

[Viv]

[Moralanqua]

Una - as we say here "Nae bother, hen!"

Netspeak? The person who invented this should be strung up next to Grima and made to hang next to his uglee mug for at least a year! Urgh!

(and call me Mora or Lucky.)

I think i know most of you from other sites/boards anyway!

(Hi Pappy! You wee minger! )

[Moralanqua]

I have read Mouse's Silm humour fics. Very good. She's a pervy one - needs to be watched.

(Are there any other writers from the UK? I only know of mouse, papilio and umnn... me - but me and pappy are scots so that dont count. we are special cause we are goddesses and tarts )

Another peeve - elvish thats not explained. Its a nice effort to have it in a fic but im not fluent so i kinda appreciate a translation ending up somewhere so i can find out what was said - i've read a fic where whole para's were written with elvish dialouge and NO translations. I felt like chunks of the plot where missing and the author was just trying to be a smart arse. (<< can i say that? )

Please translate for us non elvish experts...

[Una]

Lucky wrote:

[Panneth]

I find your discussion really interesting from the point of view of an English girl who has just left the compulsory education system. I'm a second year uni student so my last study of English was 3 years ago and as a Physics student I'm not that used to writing essays or anything creative in fact. The English and Welsh education system, which differs from the Scottish or Northern Irish one, has been shaken up recently and is still continuing to be reformed. Personally I think this has been for the worse, but there are others who would disagree.

I am complimented that some of you think you have never read a bad story by a British author, (you must have avoided mine) but to be honest, I believe that is more by luck than anything else. The English language and literature education in this country is terrible. The general education we recieve lacks instruction in basic grammar, style and stucture and we are more likely to be forced to read irrelevant books than read works by modern authors or the wonderful stories by writers out country has produced over the years. The only work I ever read at school that was even notable was "Jane Eyre". To read books written by talented authors we had to search them out on out own and share them amongst ourselves.

I'm not saying this is the fault of my teachers, it is not, but so much importance is placed on getting students through their exams that we lack the teaching that inspires people to write. So much pressure is put on schools to perform well in the league tables published every year from differeny types of school and different levels of examination that the teachers have no choice but to stick to their scheme of work and get us through the exams. There is no time for a discussion of the joys of reading or writing, just simply analysis of mediocre book after book and then solid writing of critical essays which if you listen to what you are told in class then you cannot fail to get good marks in. Even the exams we take involve anthologies of seen work where we can take our notes into the exams. The only real freedom of reading and writing comes at the advanced level that many of us do not take simply because universities demand other subjects for entry to degree courses. As for net speak, it has become part of the curriculum because it is "modern English". There are many schools where essays in text message speak or net speak are actually discussed and essays can actually be written in them. It is no wonder then many students are growing up unable to express themselves.

Well that's my humble opinion. I'm not the world's biggest fan of the education system I was forced to go through as you can tell, and if anyone wants to contradict me, feel free. You've probably all found copious spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in what I've written, but to be frank, that only serves my purpose. English writers are just as easily pulled into the writing trap that any other authors are and I think it is unfair to lay the entire blame of bad fanfiction on the head of the Americans. I also don't think that age matters, you can write bad stories no matter how old you are.

[Una]

Hi Panneth,

thank you for your conscise overview of the British school system. Here in Germany it is pretty much the same (in both German and English classes).

I think one cannot discern who writes better or worse than others, esp. not by country. It is just really obvious that some age groups make more mistakes than others, but that is not to say that ALL in one age group make these.

One of the reasons why there is not so much emphasis on grammar and syntax in your mother tongue is that you learn from hearing much more than you learn from text books from an early age. It is different from learning a second language. I know myself that my skill in writing in my native language is e.g. not as good as it is in English, even though I speak and write it every day. It is just that one uses grammar and syntax unconsciously and mistakes are always due. I have noticed that I know the English grammar and syntax better than that of my own German tongue. Even though I grew up bi-lingual. But with English classes at school, grammar was shoved down my throat and I'm infinitely more certain at the grasp of English than of my own mother tongue.

It would probably be better if there was more emphasis on grammar and sentence structure in English / German/ whatever at schools. This way at least there would be a firm basis on which to make gross mistakes

Una

[Gaslight]

I think I got out of the school system near the beginning of the end of the latest rapid decline in the US educational process. I've been out of high school for 10 years and when I left, I was beginning to feel the whole "teach to the test" mentality start to take hold. I just read an article in the UK Independent of a Brit now in CA and being shocked by the indoctrination going on in US schools. Maybe being young I don't remember it so much when I was a tyke, or just paid no attention to it. Since I can think on my own now, either I deprogrammed myself or it just never took in the first place.

I don't think that British fic writers are superior overall. I have seen some pretty atrocious crap coming from all corners of the globe.

[miriel361]

[EomerofEastfold]

Jumping in on this, I will say that I am a young author myself (Well, 22), and I know my fics aren't the greatest in the world. It's not that I don't have good ideas, but rather I have trouble filling in my stories. I usually end up going form point A to point B at 90 miles an hour, making sure to write down all the important details, but at the same time leaving out some minor ones. The result is a story that reads almost too quickly, but I never see it because my imagination fills in the gaps for me. Though, honestly, that's only my opinion of what I'm doing wrong, because most times people don't tell me.
So, if you have trouble with a fic, unless it does look like something that was slapped together in 30 seconds, try letting the author know how you feel about it. They may become better writers because of it.