every time you abuse punctuation, God kills a kitten

[meretricula]

(my hands are totally instruments of God.)

I'm just going to put this here until I figure out how to better use it: writing aids and standards collected by our holy mother of webzines, bb_shousetsu. guys... English is the worst. I know. I know, okay? I know that being a native speaker and lifelong avid reader with a thorough knowledge of Latin and a less-thorough but still present knowledge of ancient Greek gives me a leg up in the grammatical sweepstakes. but when I kick and scream and throw tantrums about how people don't know how to use commas, it's not for my own entertainment. grammar is important. language only helps us communicate when we're using the same one. commas and apostrophes and sentence fragments may seem insignificant, but they affect whether what you mean in your head is understood by the person who reads your words. think about it.

Comments

[the-beanster.livejournal.com]

Oh, I so agree, it's not even funny. I mean, I'll admit that my grammar is far from perfect but after reading "Let's go eat Jack" when I'm pretty sure the author didn't mean that the speaker wanted to eat Jack, I couldn't take the fic seriously anymore. It's something so small, but mistakes like that seriously throw me out of a fic, so yes, totally agreeing with you.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

it's kind of hard for me to articulate sometimes the effect of stumbling across a grammatical error in text, but that's pretty much it. it throws me out of the story, and then I can't get back in. I wish it didn't, but it does. =/

[the-beanster.livejournal.com]

Ugh totally with you. I sometimes think that I'm probably missing out on some great plots/ideas, but I can't :(