This weekend on dear Author was a First Page that was a study in OMG! First Page is done every saturday morning when an anonymous author puts up a first page of a WIP and the DA community comments on it. The idea is to offer critique and help an author make it better.
Saturday's page was a disaster. The author didn't know the fundamentals of writing so the punctuation was a mess, attribution a mess and the story just didn't work for a million reasons.
Does that mean the writer cannot write? No. It means the first page was a mess. It doesn't mean the writer is illiterate, a non English speaker, short, funny looking, or any of the other choices that were offered by the readers.
It was a serious disaster to read the comments because the level of assumption was appalling. I mean instead of critiquing the writing, the readers were critiquing the author instead without any idea of who the writer was.
Did I make an assumption? I did. I assumed that the writer is young, possibly high school or junior high. Am I right? no freaking idea. I sure as hell didn't think it was appropriate to assume on the author's piece of writing.
People were crazy rude in their critiques and it was an embarrassment to read. I felt terrible for the author to have to read all that was said and assumed.
Once again Shiloh Walker shows her class. She did a good critique for that author. She did one for me too, back in the day. She was very kind about the head hopping, lol.
ReplyDeleteThe other author calling it trash-I've never heard of her. As some posters like to say, that's one author who's now on my Do Not Buy list. Not that I ever did, buy her, that is, because I've never heard of her. Said that already, didn't I?
Well, it's true.
Holy crap...
ReplyDeleteI can't believe how it went from the topic at hand to being about the writer themselves. And you are so right about the assumptions Lori.
Young, old, English speaking, non-English speaking etc. I can see how those perceptions came about. I didn’t' get a sense of the age of the writer, just that it needed some work on the grammar and stuff like that. Like I'm an expert lol.
The thing that interested me though was blaming the educational system. Sure, we can do that but I blame technology. Between Facebook, Twitter, mobile phones etc, people are learning to abbreviate and use slang because it's quicker (God knows if you don't text or tweet every two seconds your fingers will fall off...).
That's fine and fun and so 'now' but IMO, we're not only losing the art of human contact but how to speak/write correctly, or even well. Which is probably not proper like grammar but you get what I mean, right?
Face it, we can have a wonderful education but the way things are going, I don't see the point when it's all going to come down to a few key strokes in the end anyway. Or is it just that I'm old fashioned and miss things like writing a letter etc. Maybe I could be your .5 of an Old Fart lol.
I know it's off topic but man, that whole post just pushed some buttons and in the end, not about the first chapter, which is why were there in the first place, wasn’t it?