Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

Having someone edit a story doesn't mean the author incorporated any of the editor's changes.

Perhaps "Not Edited"

I stopped reading a story recently because of the errors. Yet the author thanked his many editors so he thought it was edited.

I stopped reading a story recently because of the errors. Yet the author thanked his many editors so he thought it was edited.

I've seen too many of those. I sometimes get the impression that stories with more than two editors tend to be of lower quality than those with only one. :(

I'm an experienced editor and proofreader. My stories on SOL are experimental and I don't go the whole nine yards in making them as good as they could be, yet I believe they compare favourably against many stories that have been independently edited, once UK linguistic differences are taken into account.

I'm not sure 'Not Edited', 'Not Proofread' or 'Not Spellchecked' would be appropriate for my stories.

AJ

Go ahead and make a case to admin for 'Experimental'. How many current stories would qualify? How many authors would use it? Your case would need to be solid to find a place amongst the proliferation of candidates.

AJ

I thought you'd welcome my support for an 'Experimental' code. It seems I was wrong.

I was unsure how serious you were since you eschew smileys. I'd use it if it were there but I don't see a strong case for it and I don't think it's the answer to the other posters' issues.

AJ

Go ahead and make a case to admin for 'Experimental'. How many current stories would qualify? How many authors would use it? Your case would need to be solid to find a place amongst the proliferation of candidates.

'Experimental', to me, means you type an entire novel with NO grammar and NO punctuation because it's supposedly written by a cockroach (excellent book, by the way)! Anything less than that is just an author hoping his work stands apart from everyone else's stories. :(

I stopped reading a story recently because of the errors. Yet the author thanked his many editors so he thought it was edited.

I have a main editor, a proofreader, early readers, AND then a final proofreader before I post to SOL. People STILL find (and report) errors.

:-)

So much for my 'too many cooks' theory :(

AJ

I have a main editor, a proofreader, early readers, AND then a final proofreader before I post to SOL. People STILL find (and report) errors.

That always happens. It's why so many of us use multiple editors. Since each person reads what they expect to see, rather than considering the actual words on the page, even the best editors miss things, but with several, each can catch what the others miss. But to address awnlee's issue, the ultimate source of the problem is the author himself. You can't blame an editor because an author doesn't recognize sound advice.

People STILL find (and report) errors.

There a difference between finding (and reporting) errors because you have the rare or occasional error and having an author plainly state on his blog page he doesn't work with editors and his stories reflect not only that but he doesn't use spell check.

Yes, we all know that if you choose the wrong word, but spell it correctly, you're not going to get that flag. But a simple typo - use instead of sue - is something most people don't have a problem with. I've found dead tree novels with that problem. It's when you see perimetir or knukle that I start to cringe.

I stopped reading a story recently because of the errors. Yet the author thanked his many editors so he thought it was edited.

As REP says, there's submitting something to and editor, and then there's actually listening to their advice.

Not only does someone need to use an editor, but finding the right editor can be a lengthy and tedious effort, as you have to weed out the decent advice from those who don't understand grammar any better than you. :(

... the word meaning not noisy is quite...

I can understand this happening due to typing too fast, and since 'quite' is a valid word, spell check won't flag it as an error. This is where having a good proofreader comes in.

As for the story you mentioned in your other post, yeah, that needs some serious help.

edit - correct typo

Not Edited or Not Proofread would work.

Too long to work. How about either "unedited" or simply "NoEdit", imposed whether or not the author thinks they've edited the story. Maybe we could implement it for all those authors who never credit a single editor (not even their girlfriends), when posting a story.

But realistically, that last point raises the real problem, how to implement such a tag. No author will label his story's this way, and if it was imposed on a story, surely he's list his mother's step-brother who served as his unofficial 'editor'.

It's a nice idea, but there's no physical way to implement it. As it is, the best you can do is to 1-bomb the clueless idiots (after telling them why they got such a low score), but I wouldn't hold out much hope of it having much of an effect. Especially since so many newbie authors can't find anyone to edit their stories. They want help in cleaning up their stories, but the 'editor assistance' process is overly cumbersome (according to those who've tried to use it most recently).

I think people tended to give the same votes for all three categories. For myself I thought it was a category too many - "Technical Merit" and "apart from that" would have been enough.

I for one, always registered separate votes for each category (when it existed), but for talented authors, for those without much talent, the scores all end up congregating at the extremes anyway.

Unfortunately too many people weren't smart enough to use it properly.

We also have a number of people who can't use the current system properly.

I don't consider rating a story as 10 just because the author expended the time and effort to write and post the story, as one poster stated he does, to be a proper use of the rating system.

That's a rather inciteful observation ;)

AJ

That's true. It's just my opinion and others hold different opinions. They act on their beliefs and I on mine.

thanks

I actually think people who learn English as a 2nd language are more attune to English grammar than us natives. A girl from Pakistan was a Beta reader for one of my novels. English is her third language (her native language, then Arabic, then English).

I wrote "…than her." She correctly told me it should be "…than she." I actually left it wrong because, to us non-formal English speakers, it sounds better. So where we limp along hearing and speaking English our whole lives, she learned the rules.

I wrote "…than her." She correctly told me it should be "…than she."

You're right in that only formal English would use that, but who uses formal English these days? In the context of your writing, it's my opinion that you were right originally and she was wrong.

AJ

but who uses formal English these days?

That was my point. As a second language, she learned rules that we don't know or ignore. She was better at grammar than I. (me sound so much better)

Personally I think the rule is flawed anyway.

Grammarians reckon that when the 'be' verb is used, it indicates the putative subject and putative object are equivalent, therefore I/you/he/we/you/they should be used for the latter. But in the case of comparisons, it's clear the author does NOT intend for them to be equivalent and it's my opinion that me/you/him/us/you/them should be used instead.

No English native would say, "The Accrington Stanley players are better than we." And people learning English as a second language shouldn't be taught to say that.

AJ

I never score a story I abandon.

Which is why Lazeez had to adjust the scores. The scores were too high.

I rarely score a story I abandon because I never know if it will turn out to be a great story at the end. I never thought it was fair to the author. But if I abandon a story because it's unreadable, then I do skip to the end and score it accordingly. The former situation is what the author wrote (plot/appeal). The latter how it's written (technical).

If you seriously believe that, I'd like to know which purpose do you think such an adjustment would serve.

Lazeez said so in his justification for changing the scoring system. The purpose is not to have every story with a score of 9–10.

And to have every story with a score of 8-9 or 7-8 would be better?

It is what it is. We need to accept it.

I believe the old scoring upset Lazeez as much as the new one does authors today. Maybe more. It upset him to see all the scores so high. I guess, to him, it defeated the purpose of scoring. How would a reader use the score to choose a story? Is there really a difference between 9.1 and 9.3?

And remember the TPA scoring? That drove him nuts when he saw TPA scores of 10/10/10, 9/9/9, 8/8/8, … 1/1/1. That's why he finally did away with the TPA. People weren't using it right.

The higher a story score, the lesser its adjustment

How would a story score of 1 be adjusted?

AJ

'The higher a story score, the lesser its adjustment' implies 'the lower a story score, the greater its adjustment'.

You over-simplified the consequences of a complex algorithm.

AJ

I think adjusting the scores is created mainly to avoid the consistently 1-scoring trolls.

That was a later change. The one that dropped the top and bottom 5%.

The change was to spread out scores. I guess like a bell curve in reverse.

Almost every word processor can do that on-the-fly.

That's my point, actually. How is it that stories get posted, regardless of your actual fluency with English, without hitting the spellcheck button? I think most of them use F7. What are you writing and then posting with, Notepad?

Experienced writers using text only apps may not be as uncommon as you think. I know of two who do it. It's pure speculation on my behalf, but perhaps they find the whizbangery to be distracting.

I use BBEdit on my Mac to do all my editing. Having everything in plain text, UTF-8 encoded, is the easiest way to work with files. BBEdit has powerful search abilities, and if I need something that goes beyond that, I can use the terminal on my Mac to use vim, perl, grep, awk, sed, or a host of other tools.

Mainly, I don't need all the baggage that comes with MS Word (or the OpenOffice, LibreOffice work-alikes) or Pages. A pure text editor is SO much faster (and it does offer spellcheck 'on the fly').

To do my publication, I use Scrivener which easily imports those text files (complete with all the Cyrillic, Swedish, and Japanese text).

What are you writing and then posting with, Notepad?

I don't recall who's blog I was reading the other day, but they said they type their stories directly into SOL's submission page!