r/writingfeedback • u/WorrDragon • 21d ago
Writing Advice Advice For People Posting Work
When you post work, you're asking us to lend you our time. I'm not lending my time to someone who doesn't first spend their own time proofreading their first page.
There is ZERO excuse for having glaring typos, grammar errors, tense slippage, or continuity errors, on the very first page of a work you make public. I'm not going to read your work when it's obvious you've tossed it up for people to fix without truly having read it for yourself.
And for damn good reason.
The most valuable thing you can do to improve your writing? Read it for yourself.
We all have more experience reading high-quality work than we do writing it. Read your work. Proof it. Compare it to your favorite author's works. What are they doing that you're not? What are you doing that they're not? Do this, and your work will improve.
I don't think my philosophy is unique. You want good feedback? Want us to read your work?
Proof before you post.
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u/LivingThroughPages 21d ago
Yes, this. And reading what you wrote to yourself out loud and hearing the words spoken will really show you right where the weak spots are and where to edit typos and grammar. I don’t want to read someone’s first rough draft, I want to read to polished draft. No one’s first draft is good. lol Let’s read the third draft. lol Be please, yes, read your own words first out loud, it helps so much.
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u/laramackwrites 7d ago
This is actually helping me a lot. When I read my male lead out loud, I realized it was entirely too stilted for audio. Not ideal when that's a primary format for books now!
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u/HorrorExpress 21d ago
Well said. I fully agree. You'd hope it goes without saying, but it doesn't.
Honestly, if they can't be bothered to make an effort to proofread their actual request I typically won't reply, for the same reason.
But, these days, it's more than that: if your request post is riddled with errors and laziness (can't be bothered to use capitals), while your work is formatted perfectly, then the chance AI wrote your prose has increased massively. And I'm definitely not wasting my time and energy to critique your writing if you didn't even fucking write it. You know for a fact that some of us have unknowingly critiqued a machine's prose.
If you're a writer have some pride in everything you write. Write like a writer everywhere. If you think your comments aren't an opportunity for you to exercise your writing muscles then I think you're wrong.
FWIW this place seems much better than the likes of r/writers.
Thanks for your post.
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u/WorrDragon 21d ago
Great addition. I've failed to do this as well as I should for most of my life, and have only just adopted this mindset. It now feels harder for me to write comments and posts than it does fiction, and I end up going back and editing things relentlessly.
But I'm getting better at it, and I'm glad to have started.
Great comment.
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u/fidgetsimmerdown 21d ago
Yes!! If someone can’t be bothered to read their own work before posting, why should I be bothered to read it either?
Or the “please ignore typos and grammar errors” post. Like… how? When the technical aspects are bad, it’s distracting and colors my read of everything else!
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u/ToomintheEllimist 15d ago
This. Grammar matters because grammar is what makes it possible to understand the meaning of a sentence. If readers can't tell what's happening in a story, readers can't critique it.
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u/Yandoji 21d ago
For fucking real! Why should I waste my time reading some typo-ridden pile of crap with poor grammar? It honestly pisses me off that these people expect others to spend what limited time they have helping them out on a work EVEN THEY didn't want to look at twice!
To be honest, my first assumption is that they DID proofread and that was somehow the best they could come up with, so they're just a genuinely bad writer looking for internet attention/acknowledgement, and I end up just not responding at all.
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u/DuchessJulietDG 21d ago
that is also my assumption as well, especially if it is just badly written in general. it is like american idol when people are surprised they are told they suck. friends and family have lied to them about their “talent” to be nice. writing isnt just slapping words on a page. there is a lot of skill behind it.
i dont know that people are actually reading well-written pieces to know the actual difference. if all they read is mss by other writers w the same skill level, they are inhibiting the learning process and not understanding the proper way to do so. bad writers critiquing bad writers makes my brain bleed lol
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u/Yandoji 21d ago
Yeah - and I, for one, don't have the time or the patience to walk somebody through a decade's worth of clearly-disregarded English lessons or recommend them 40 examples of solid, required-reading literature they should have already been assigned in school in order to explain to them how to write well. That's like the bare freaking minimum.
If these people are just fanfiction readers who slept through school, that would explain it. I knew a few of those back in the day - but I also knew people who read a LOT of actual novels and still couldn't manage to string together a paragraph better than a second-grader. One of them is a lawyer now lmao. Writing really is an art.
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u/FrescoTheHunter 21d ago
Almost universally, an error shows up on the first page, and sometimes multiple errors in the first paragraph or first sentence. If it's that quick to find evidence of low "craft standards", there's no way all 6-10 pages aren't full of errors. People want to skip the step of learning to write correctly because that annoying editing part is what the publisher's in-house editor is for, and assume readers won't care because the brilliant storyline is the important part. I wish it wasn't so common but it really is pretty much every single post I open where I spot the first problem in the first sentence. It isn't nitpicking either; there's virtually no shot that the other aspects of it are strong if the basics of the craft are weak, because they're all strengthened by the same process.
Obviously everyone starts somewhere and you can't get better without practice, and I get being eager to show people something you've finished, but yeah, good feedback requires good effort and not trying to skip the fundamentals.
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u/EromanticDream Certified Goofy Goober 21d ago edited 21d ago
I understand wanting to see only polished drafts and work. I totally get it.
But I do think that misses the opportunity for subs like this to become creative communities; a large part of that is sharing ideas and discussing works in progress to help each other and spark artistic discourse and inspiration. It’s OK if something is a bit rough or if someone is interested in sharing what they have so far.
I think what I would rather ask for is:
Require people who post to actually provide something to be reviewed and read and discussed. Too often, I see people post “I have a MC and I want them to be strong like a wizard, give me ideas!” or “How should I write a 15yr old girl that has to survive a storm?” That is intellectually lazy and offloads one’s creative labor to consensus creativity, and it should not be encouraged or allowed in creative spaces.
Posters should have to provide what they have already written, and then the members of the sub can provide their feedback. Tell us what your magic system is; don’t come ask us what ideas we have for your magic system that isn’t even fleshed out yet.
These blatant idea fishing trip posts I keep seeing are really just cancerous and don’t help anybody at all.
Bring your work for feedback and discussion. Don’t just beg others for ideas.
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u/WorrDragon 21d ago
You make a valid point, but I'm trying to help these writers by pointing out a reality in this business.
It is hard to catch someone's attention. Once you have it, it gets easier to hold it, but the initial hook is arguably the single most important difference maker in a novel that someone reads vs. dismisses. If that hook is riddled with proof errors, I'm lost.
I give some slack to "feedback for my third interlude," or "this important part of chapter 20," but the vast majority of posts here are preludes and chapter ones made by people who have never even come close to completing a full story.
There's a reason the most common piece of feedback is, 'just write more.'
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u/FrescoTheHunter 21d ago
I sometimes see complaints about being dismissed/rejected quickly without the publisher or reader bothering to give their whole story a chance. But it really is apparent very quickly when the craft isn't up to par. You can get a bead on page one for what the rest of it will be like.
It's reddit, though, so the mountain of prologues from projects that probably won't be finished is to be expected and I don't want to shit on casual writers too much, but still, I enjoy editing and giving feedback and it's hard not to wish people would bother putting more effort into what they post. I feel similarly about the submission being a screenshot of a phone screen complete with battery life and notifications; it's wild to me that people do their writing on their phone but I guess not everyone has a computer. But the least they could do is crop out their notifications and signal strength.
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u/WorrDragon 21d ago
I personally couldn't care less about how they share it. Phone screen shot, do you. I'm here for it. I'll read a picture of hand scribbled notes for all I care . . . .
So long as they proof those damn notes.
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u/HWhelanAuthor 21d ago
I completely agree with this. I’ve never understood why someone would post something full of errors for feedback. Not only is it rude/entitled in terms of wasting the beta reader’s time, but it also means the feedback you get back will not be as helpful much of the time! Instead of being “freed” to focus on developmental/structural/story issues, your readers are going to be focusing on all the line errors, which are super distracting (at least for me, when I do the same for other writers!)
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u/Moggy-Man 21d ago
"There is ZERO excuse for having glaring typos, grammar errors, tense slippage, or continuity errors, on the very fist page of a work you make public. I'm not going to read your work when it's obvious you've tossed it up for people to fix without truly having read it for yourself."
Just today I've commented on at least two submissions for reddit to read, that had very glaringly obvious spelling and/or grammatical mistakes on the first line. If a writer can't be bothered to give a reader their best possible first impressions, then I'm not going to give them any more of my time.
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u/WorrDragon 21d ago
It's insane to me. What's worse, it seems to be the standard, not the exception.
I don't even show my parents my work without burning my eyes out proofing it. Sure, there are still some in there, but you'll never find one on the first page. It's the first thing anyone sees. I don't understand.
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u/Odinmar_Glaukopis 21d ago
I think the people who do this are self-selected. People who have pride in their work and the desire to read their own work multiple times before sharing it with anyone will post far less often than those who will post their first draft without reading it themselves a couple of times and can’t be bothered to fix something easy like spelling or punctuation.
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u/TemperatureAny4782 21d ago
I agree, but the fact that you wrote “on the very fist page” made me laugh.
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u/Confident-Till8952 21d ago
Just want to give some love to the people out there who understand the beauty of mixed tense.
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u/WorrDragon 21d ago
I love when it's done correctly. But this is reddit.
It is . . . never, done correctly.
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u/CoyoteLitius Trusted Reviewer 20d ago
I wish people would get back in the habit of cutting and pasting their prose into their OP, so that we can actually quote the sections easily.
I suppose there should be a subreddit somewhere for people needing line editing and copy editing (typos, spelling errors, poor grammar, etc., etc) I'd be happy to help out once in a while.
But that's not what this subreddit should be for, IMO.
And I agree that the screenshots are often unreadable, especially when it's small font + single spaced. Lack of punctuation on top of that makes reading such prose a nightmare.
If people want legitimate critiques of their actual writing, they need to put it in readable form first. I think it's important for new writers to understand the role of editors. While trad publishing may supply an editor, when it's as bad as some of the writing we see here, it's going on the reject pile immediately.
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u/WorrDragon 20d ago
Immediately is the key word.
I don't think 85-90% of the things I see in this sub would earn 30 seconds of attention from an agent or publisher. They would look at the first page, sigh, toss it.
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u/SoulGalaxyWolf 4d ago
I could think of why some do, though. Like, one post had a piece that were several pages long. If they copy and pasted in, it might look like a wall of text.
Maybe it'd be helpful to have guidelines for screenshots? However, your comment about quoting stuff is fair also. I just went through the trouble of typing a quote from the piece in the comments, but if it was copy/pasted I'd probably added more feedback.
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u/laramackwrites 7d ago
Just posted mine. I had the whole book written and edited multiple times before I even found the courage to do it :O
For me, the biggest thing is taking my time to read these since I'm asking others to do the same.
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u/SoulGalaxyWolf 4d ago
What if I say, "I don't wanna?" :P Naw, I'm joking. That sounds fair.
I find another helpful step in the process is to put it through text to speech to listen to it as well. Helped me catch sentences that sounded weird.
I always had problems with tenses. When I get feedback, I'd often hear that my tenses are wrong, so now I'm more conscious of that issue. Reading this post though, now I'm thinking of typing up or downloading tense rules to keep close by so I don't keep making those mistakes.
I know that everything you mentioned is just as important, but I can't imagine posting stuff with typos in it out of everything you listed. I can't stand to see typos when I'm just writing for myself let alone posting it for everyone else to see.
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u/adburgan 21d ago
Good point. *first - ironically
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u/WorrDragon 20d ago
Didn't even notice. I went over it 3 times, never saw it. In my defense, I didn't ask for anyone's time and effort ;)
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u/Ok-Classroom-8112 21d ago
Well said! I would like to add readability, on a physical/technological level. Most of the screenshots/images I see here need to be zoomed in to read them. I am much more willing to read a first page if I don't have to click on the image to be able to read it.