readers Readers, What Do You Skip?

[Backwoods Boy]

19 minutes ago, droughtquake said:

Graphically, the use of quotation marks as a method of emphasis is one of my pet peeves! It’s amusing when it can be interpreted as a sarcastic or ironic calling out.

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Some people use computers as if they were typewriters, never changing the font or style. But one common problem is that the standard fonts preinstalled don’t offer much contrast. Nothing particularly bold (and definitely not black) or thin, and the serifs don’t stand out from the san serifs – and when is Comic Sans ever really useful? If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, but produce flyers, newsletters, or other similar documents, I suggest reading (not the comedian) Robin (Patricia) Williams’ The Non-Designers Design Book (and Mac Is Not a Typewriter) from Peachpit Press. The N-DDB helps you to understand some basic design rules without getting too technical or confusing. It’ll help you create professional looking documents without requiring classes or a lot of money.

Those of us who grew up with typewriters (never leave for college without one) are probably the biggest offenders.  But I leave creative documents to others.

I note your disdain for Comic Sans, and observe that I have found Comic Sans Bold Italic useful for such diverse purposes as fake tattoos on photos and offensive social media posts.   

[Guest]

5 hours ago, Backwoods Boy said:

Those of us who grew up with typewriters (never leave for college without one) are probably the biggest offenders.  But I leave creative documents to others.

I learned to type on a typewriter too. But I learned in N-DDB that double-spaces between sentences are redundant in the era of proportional fonts. Because typewritten letters were all the same width (an ‘i’ or an ‘l’ are the same width as an ‘m’ or a ‘w’), the extra space was necessary to visually separate sentences from individual words. Just because many others do something doesn’t make it automatically correct. As we gain experience and learn new things, we can and should adapt and grow.

Contrast is another big lesson from N-DDB. Contrast in size, in style, and in weight. You don’t want someone to think you accidentally used the wrong font. You want it to be very apparent that you deliberately changed things for emphasis or visual interest.

Many people are required to produce graphs, charts, presentations, or reports for work. I hope you never need to create a lost pet flyer. Those tasks all benefit from learning a few handy tricks and guidelines. When you know the rules, you know when and how to break them.

When you notice that some memes are more visually compelling, you realize that some people know how to make them look better than others.

Edited February 17, 2020 by droughtquake

[Thorn Wilde]

On 2/16/2020 at 5:17 PM, Hstrychsr said:

droughtquake - I hear you.  There can be valid reasons for many types of mistakes - even in our writing!  However, I have paid good money for too many books from well established authors only to find the book peppered with problems.  When a friend of mine asked me to do some editing and beta reading, I returned to him with a single sentence - his, from his own book.

John had had a friendship since he had met Raven in the third grade, and the two of them had become instant besties.

Seriously?!  All those hads...!  Over the years, I have come to view that word as measuring tool.  The more often it shows up, the newer the writer.  It's difficult to believe that an experienced writer would EVER leave that sentence alone.  After putting out money, a person should not have to deal with those types of errors, even if the writing obviously comes from an inexperienced author.  Editing and beta readers are important.  ...or maybe I'm just a grumpy ol' snob..?

Now that is a very bad sentence. It's true that a lot of 'had's can (and should) be eliminated by simply changing the sentence structure. In the case of the sentence above, I'd cut half of it and just write, 'John and Raven had met in the third grade and become instant besties,' for instance. It can also be a good idea to restructure or rephrase sentences with 'was' in them. A good way to make things more interesting. Either way, though, the key is variety. If every sentence in a paragraph is 'subject, verb, object', things get boring fast, for instance.

22 hours ago, Backwoods Boy said:

Punctuation counts, and as much complaint as there is about the English language, the punctuation rules aren't that difficult to understand. 

While punctuation definitely counts, punctuation rules in English are actually extremely complex, convoluted, and inconsistent, especially where commas are concerned. There are vast varieties of styles that use commas differently (Oxford comma or not is only one of many points where people wildly disagree) and no hardcore rules for them. You can ask three different editors who are equally experienced, educated, and knowledgeable and get three completely different answers about comma placement. 

Edited February 17, 2020 by Thorn Wilde
fixed a typo

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Thorn Wilde said:

While punctuation definitely counts, punctuation rules in English are actually extremely complex, convoluted, and inconsistent, especially where commas are concerned.

I know that English vocabulary and pronunciation is complex because we’ve imported from so many different languages and language family, but did that affect our punctuation too?

Edited February 17, 2020 by droughtquake

[Hstrychsr]

Thorn Wilde - I agree that punctuation can be tricky.  And at times, so can grammar!  

As for the 'hads', I would have simplified the sentence to:  Since meeting Raven in third grade, she and John have been besties.        Clear, quick, easy. 

[Thorn Wilde]

1 hour ago, Hstrychsr said:

Thorn Wilde - I agree that punctuation can be tricky.  And at times, so can grammar!  

As for the 'hads', I would have simplified the sentence to:  Since meeting Raven in third grade, she and John have been besties.        Clear, quick, easy. 

That's not grammatically correct. First of all, you've changed the tense from past to present, by using 'have' rather than 'had'. Also, 'Raven' is the object of the first half, with 'she and John' being the implied subjects of both halves, so you've put three people in that sentence rather than two.

EDIT: It would in theory be understandable if you wrote 'John and she' rather than 'she and John', but it's still ambiguous.

Edited February 17, 2020 by Thorn Wilde

[Thorn Wilde]

3 hours ago, droughtquake said:

I know that English vocabulary and pronunciation is complex because we’ve imported from so many different languages and language family, but did that affect our punctuation too?

Probably not. What punctuation rules there are are much younger than the language itself.

[Hstrychsr]

2 hours ago, Thorn Wilde said:

That's not grammatically correct. First of all, you've changed the tense from past to present, by using 'have' rather than 'had'. Also, 'Raven' is the object of the first half, with 'she and John' being the implied subjects of both halves, so you've put three people in that sentence rather than two.

EDIT: It would in theory be understandable if you wrote 'John and she' rather than 'she and John', but it's still ambiguous.

This is why I enjoy grammar.  Technically, you may be correct, although I suspect the vast majority of Americans would not know it.  

There is also room for debate.  How technically correct does it need to be in order to make the meaning clear?  How technically correctly does an author need to write?  How many of us actually speak the way words are written?    I wrote a piece that confused people because it was grammatically correct but not very much like the normal way the target readers spoke.   Most Americans are woefully educated regarding grammar and punctuation so I lean toward clarity rather than technicallities.  Even among my own grammar and punctuation police, I have heard some interesting and rather inane debate regarding who is MORE correct...  

In my mind, there is very little ambiguity.  Raven and John have been best friends since third grade.  (I'm sorry.  I changed to 'have' since I know the rest of the story.  I should have added that the two remained best friends throughout the story - which the author was trying to tell in real time.)

Edited February 18, 2020 by Hstrychsr

[Thorn Wilde]

22 hours ago, Hstrychsr said:

This is why I enjoy grammar.  Technically, you may be correct, although I suspect the vast majority of Americans would not know it.  

There is also room for debate.  How technically correct does it need to be in order to make the meaning clear?  How technically correctly does an author need to write?  How many of us actually speak the way words are written?    I wrote a piece that confused people because it was grammatically correct but not very much like the normal way the target readers spoke.   Most Americans are woefully educated regarding grammar and punctuation so I lean toward clarity rather than technicallities.  Even among my own grammar and punctuation police, I have heard some interesting and rather inane debate regarding who is MORE correct...  

In my mind, there is very little ambiguity.  Raven and John have been best friends since third grade.  (I'm sorry.  I changed to 'have' since I know the rest of the story.  I should have added that the two remained best friends throughout the story - which the author was trying to tell in real time.)

You say you lean toward clarity, but that wasn't clear at all. Like I said, you put three people in the sentence. Raven, she, and John. Now, 'Raven and John have been best friends since third grade' is perfectly fine. It was the 'since meeting' part that made the sentence not make sense. As for how you write vs how you speak, in dialogue I'm all for writing like you talk. But in the prose itself, you really should follow basic rules of grammar and punctuation, unless you have a very good and compelling reason not to that furthers your narrative artistically (Cloud Atlas, A Clockwork Orange, and Flowers for Algernon are examples of titles that purposefully did this, and to great effect). 

Edited to add: I believe in writing the story you want to write, the way you want to write it, and I'm not one to enforce hard rules about how to tell a story. But it should be told in a way that the readers can understand, and that's why we have spelling, grammar, and punctuation rules and conventions; so that we can communicate our message to people in a way that they understand. That's the whole purpose of language.

Edited February 18, 2020 by Thorn Wilde

[Guest]

33 minutes ago, Thorn Wilde said:

You say you lean toward clarity, but that wasn't clear at all. Like I said, you put three people in the sentence. Raven, she, and John. Now, 'Raven and John have been best friends since third grade' is perfectly fine. It was the 'since meeting' part that made the sentence not make sense. As for how you write vs how you speak, in dialogue I'm all for writing like you talk. But in the prose itself, you really should follow basic rules of grammar and punctuation, unless you have a very good and compelling reason not to that furthers your narrative artistically (Cloud Atlas, A Clockwork Orange, and Flowers for Algernon are examples of titles that purposefully did this, and to great effect). 

Edited to add: I believe in writing the story you want to write, the way you want to write it, and I'm not one to enforce hard rules about how to tell a story. But it should be told in a way that the readers can understand, and that's why we have spelling, grammar, and punctuation rules and conventions; so that we can communicate our message to people in a way that they understand. That's the whole purpose of language.

In English, it is very easy to create a sentence that is grammatically and punctuation-ally correct while being very ambiguous in meaning.
;–)

[Thorn Wilde]

5 minutes ago, droughtquake said:

In English, it is very easy to create a sentence that is grammatically and punctuation-ally correct while being very ambiguous in meaning.
;–)

This is perfectly true, but the potential ambiguity of English is never made better by poor grammar either.  

Edited February 18, 2020 by Thorn Wilde

[Brayon]

I personally trust the ex-English teacher that does technical edits on my stories. He hasn't steered me wrong, and explains why he suggests the edits he does. Both BB and tim are invaluable to me on editing.

[BigBen]

While I find that I am usually gripped by a rousing story, even despite deficiencies in the writing, there are limits.  Too much faulty grammar, too many misspellings, too many wrong homophones, and I'm out of there.  A lot of this is a matter of taste, of course, and my limits may be different from other people's.  They may also vary from author to author.  But I do tend to loose it if their are two many sine's that the righter never bothered to go back and re-reed his' or her work be four posting it.  I also can't stand such egregious errors as "walla" and "viola" for "voilà."  If you are not absolutely certain how to spell a word, look it up.  (You should probably look up any word you don't use every day, as well, no matter how certain you are of the spelling.)  As others have pointed out, an author's goal is generally to communicate with the audience, and it is self-defeating to put obstacles in the way of comprehension.  As Fowler points out, if you want to make your readers work for your meaning, you should do it on purpose, and not by forcing them to find it through a thicket of poor writing.

While dialogue doesn't need to tag every single line with the name of the speaker, authors need to be careful to make it unmistakable who says what.  I start to lose patience when I have to go back over a passage line by line to figure out the speaker of each line, and especially if it doesn't eventually come clear who said exactly what.  Occasionally you will need to explicitly state who said a line, in order to keep the dialogue on track.

(Just as a side note, while it's not a good idea to keep finding new substitutes for the word "said," there is nothing wrong with " 'Shut up,' he explained," as long as you don't overdo it.)

The same goes for pronouns.  Because readers generally refer back to the most recent possible noun candidate, a careful writer will make it clear what the referent is for every single pronoun, even at the cost of repeating the noun when necessary.  "He said he didn't know what he was talking about," can become extremely ambiguous in a scene discussing three male characters.  Sometimes you just have to write "Paul said John didn't know what Steve was talking about," so that the reader will know what you mean.

I found my way here from a couple of other, more explicitly pornographic sites, and I like that the stories here are generally more about character and plot than about sex.  Don't get me wrong; I love a good sex scene.  But it has to further the story, or I'll be skipping it.  And if the story is primarily about sex rather than romance, it's not for me.  One story I otherwise really enjoy has the characters fucking at every conceivable opportunity, so I generally skip the sex scenes, because most of them are gratuitous.  I stick with this story in spite of, not because of, the sex.  In another story I like, the main characters are grotesquely oversexed for comic effect, but even there, there is only so much boinking I can take before I begin skipping scenes.  If your characters are so immature that they have to take every single opportunity for a quickie, then you're going to lose me at some point, even if the plot is gripping.

I can stand a lot more repetitive emotionality than I can too much sex.  For example, in the first story I mentioned, that I like so much, the main character has inherited enormous wealth (yes, I know) and has an exaggeratedly difficult time coping, but I find his excessively repeated panic attacks easier to take than the unrealistic amount of sex he and his lover have.  But even so, if the character doesn't start learning to cope better at some point, I just know I'm going to lose interest in the series.

Religion is very tricky to handle, and most writers should probably stay away from explicitly religious scenes.  Although I am quite devout myself, more often than not such scenes are embarrassing and eminently skippable.  Katherine Kurtz, herself a bishop as well as a writer, is the only author I know of who can handle liturgy and religious themes properly.  Garrett Randall, a priest in the Old Catholic church, mostly did a good job in his Lord Darcy mysteries.  (Some of his scenes are a bit heavy-handed—though that may have been a stylistic choice on his part, come to think of it.)  Lastly, Rumer Godden's In this House of Brede is the only novel I know of that captures the monastic experience at all well.

Yes, every possible plot has already been written, and this was true as far back as Homer's day.  Yet as the saying goes, "a good writer borrows, but the best writers steal."  The science-fiction writer Connie Willis wrote of reading another author's story and thinking, "He stole that from Shakespeare!"  She then remarks that she immediately started figuring out how she could steal the idea for herself.  She points out that the circumstances may change, but the issues are human issues, and they remain constant.  The trick is to figure out an engaging way to re-tell the story.

[MichaelS36]

29 minutes ago, BigBen said:

But I do tend to loose it if their are two many sine's that the righter never bothered to go back and re-reed his' or her work be four posting it. 

Well said. 

[Ron]

 @BigBen I enjoyed reading your essay. I find myself in agreement with much of what you say. Also, I very much enjoyed reading Katherine Kurtz’s writing. As a layperson and not one being especially familiar with the pomp and ceremony she describes in her Camber, Deryni and Kelson trilogies, I nevertheless appreciated the atmosphere this aspect provided to the many books. The religious conflict is of course essential to connect the various storylines of her novels but the detail, as you said, was not amiss in this case.

[Thorn Wilde]

5 hours ago, BigBen said:

Yes, every possible plot has already been written, and this was true as far back as Homer's day.  Yet as the saying goes, "a good writer borrows, but the best writers steal."  The science-fiction writer Connie Willis wrote of reading another author's story and thinking, "He stole that from Shakespeare!"  She then remarks that she immediately started figuring out how she could steal the idea for herself.  She points out that the circumstances may change, but the issues are human issues, and they remain constant.  The trick is to figure out an engaging way to re-tell the story.

This is an important point. There's nothing new under the sun; it's just a question of how we tell our stories. Originality rarely lies in the premise or the basic themes of the tale. It's in the details, the voice, the tone, and so on. That's how you set your story apart from other stories that, if you strip away all the trimmings, are the same story underneath.

[Paideia]

To go back a bit to the original question, I do have a few things, that I will occasionally or even frequently skip over when reading. However, the things that make me stop reading a stor entirely are often very different. Sections with bad grammar or spelling, for instance, wouldn't be something I would skip but may make me stop reading altogether.. For this post, I'll stick to the first category - parts of the text, that I will skip or skim over:

• Physical descriptions of the characters with the sole purpose of telling us how hot they are
  My standards of beauty could be wildly different from the author's and in any case I'm perfectly able to imagine hot guys myself.. It mostly serves no purpose in the actual story. If it does, let it be communicated by how other people react to that person.
• Descriptions of songs or even (ugh!) song lyrics.
  Nothing pulls me out of a story quicker than an author telling me that this song really sums up that character, scene, or mood. I understand that to the author there might be an extreme and appropriate association with a piece of music (I have that for many things myself) but it really doesn't communicate well. Music is an extremely subjective thing. Don't use this as a shorthand for emotional impact. Earn my tears..
• Trigger warnings
  They frame the reading in an way that is often not helpful. If I see a mention of non-consensual sex in the first paragraph, my reading of that chapter is gonna be focused on this and all the work the author did on the other parts of that chapter could be wasted.. I realize that a lot of people find them very useful but I always avoid them. Whether they are a good thing or not in general is a much longer and much more complicated discussion. Let's argue about that another day.. 😉
• Sex scenes
  Not all of them but frequently they are too long or too awkward or too poorly written. These criticisms are ones that I frequently have in well-reviewed bestseller printed books as well. As an example I love Pillars of the Earth but it has two of the worst sex scenes ever put to paper that feel SO out of character with the rest of the novel. It's simply really, really difficult to write sexy well. Smut is easy. A cursory examination of Nifty.org should prove that beyond any doubt, but writing something to be sexy and moving and still feel like an organic part of a novel is incredibly hard. To be honest, I have much the same problem with film and television. So many bad sex scenes.. Even without the saxophone music..
• Author messages about their backgrounds for writing or how sorry they are about the delays
  I'm sorry. I'm going to seem like such an asshole here, but I really don't want that in the story proper. If I'm truly invested in the story or find it sufficiently good I may seek it out, but even then I would prefer it contained to the comment section or the forums. And this goes both ways actually. If an author's real life caused certain delays in the publishing of an online romance novel, that's just the way it is.. They don't owe me anything. I have a right to feel frustrated that I won't get the resolution to a story, but I don't get to demand anything from the author..

All right. That should be more than enough to generate a reaction. 😉
These are my personal skips. I do not speak for the larger audience on GA in any way. Please don't feel that you have to appease me in your writing. Write for yourselves first, as someone else pointed out earlier in this thread.

[Talo Segura]

5 hours ago, Paideia said:

Physical descriptions

Yeah, I agree, feel the same.

5 hours ago, Paideia said:

Descriptions of songs or even (ugh!) song lyrics.

Guilty of that, song lyrics. I now feel it's okay to set the atmosphere by, for example, saying what was playing, but quoting lyrics is out. 

5 hours ago, Paideia said:

Trigger warnings

Yeah, agree, really crap, does exactly what you say, makes you read the chapter waiting for the bit that triggers the warning.

5 hours ago, Paideia said:

Sex scenes

Yeah, difficult to do well, but like pornography I love it when it is done well 😜

5 hours ago, Paideia said:

Author messages about their backgrounds for writing

I'm indifferent about personal lives creating delays, or apologies for huge lapses of time between chapters, apart from feeling sympathetic towards the author's life problems, I would probably just drop the story. Learning about the background to writing a story and more about the author, I find interesting, especially if I like their work. I'd certainly rather read about the author's views outside their stories.

5 hours ago, Paideia said:

That should be more than enough to generate a reaction.

Yeah, it was 🤣

[Ron]

8 hours ago, Paideia said:

Music is an extremely subjective thing. Don't use this as a shorthand for emotional impact. Earn my tears..

Love this, especially the 'Earn my tears..', which I take it to mean an author must emotionally manipulate the reader with words.

What a novel concept! (pun intended)

While I mostly agree, there are times when an inclusion of music can help propel a scene. Let me use the example of a character who might appear to be emotionally in control of themselves in appearance but just the opposite on the inside -- say that the character is in a car and turns on the radio and a song comes on that particularly suits the situation and is also meaningful to the character (how many times has that happened in real life) and their outward facade comes crumbling down -- is it then that the author should be looked at askance for using music in creating that type of scene? -- or, perhaps, for writing a cliche'd scene, because some readers look poorly on those, too, and I just used that example?!

It's just that I have read stories here on GA that have used music and lyrics overly much and I have read stories that have used either example, sometimes both, to good effect. I've either powered through the poor examples or skipped through those scenes because I don't think an otherwise well written story needs to be written off due to the one small thing I am not fond of in that particular story. No one should ask me for specific examples as I don't keep a running list of either one.

As for an author telling... well, some say an author should show not tell.

[Carlos Hazday]

11 hours ago, Paideia said:

Descriptions of songs or even (ugh!) song lyrics.
Nothing pulls me out of a story quicker than an author telling me that this song really sums up that character, scene, or mood. I understand that to the author there might be an extreme and appropriate association with a piece of music (I have that for many things myself) but it really doesn't communicate well. Music is an extremely subjective thing. Don't use this as a shorthand for emotional impact. Earn my tears..

I like your overall attitude. However, as in most things in life, there are exceptions.

Singer follows an aspiring musician competing on The Voice; songs were essential. I chose each one as a reflection of the character, a rabidly proud New Yorker. I/he picked a couple of songs about NYC. Because lyrics are copyrighted material not to be used without permission, I didn't. ( I did so once but don't think I'll repeat that.) Except for those from an original song performed in the finale. @Parker Owens was kind enough to write it for my character and gave me permission to print the lyrics.

Edited April 7, 2020 by Carlos Hazday

[Brayon]

On 4/7/2020 at 7:24 AM, Paideia said:

Trigger warnings
They frame the reading in an way that is often not helpful. If I see a mention of non-consensual sex in the first paragraph, my reading of that chapter is gonna be focused on this and all the work the author did on the other parts of that chapter could be wasted.. I realize that a lot of people find them very useful but I always avoid them. Whether they are a good thing or not in general is a much longer and much more complicated discussion. Let's argue about that another day.. 😉

This, I agree with, and any further discussion I would have on them, would surely send this to The Pit. However, they are required on GA for certain story elements, and I've had to use them on a few of mine because of that requirement. I have a story now, that when I go to post it, would required several Trigger Warnings and Story Tags the Admin require. So, sometimes, this is beyond the Author's control.

On 4/7/2020 at 7:24 AM, Paideia said:

If an author's real life caused certain delays in the publishing of an online romance novel, that's just the way it is.. They don't owe me anything. I have a right to feel frustrated that I won't get the resolution to a story, but I don't get to demand anything from the author..

I love that you've expressed this, and that most Readers would have this attitude. However, there are some Readers out there, who are the opposite, and demand that you post the next chapter, or story in a series, because they feel entitled to it. Sometimes an attitude like yours, and a good compliment is enough to get an Author to post that next chapter, or story, because they've finally had time to write it, or felt inspired enough to write it and post it. While the latter, will make Authors run for the hills.