green-tea

So when I see stories with very poor grammar and punctuation, bordering on chatspeak or textspeak or whatever these crazy kids call it these days... I question whether the author is telling the truth about being over the age of 18.
Seriously. Think about it a moment. Most of us have figured out by age 18 how to write, if not 100% correct, at least close enough to get by pretty well. The few exceptions I've found have been the kind of people that don't enjoy writing and wouldn't do it in their free time, or didn't have English as their first language. I don't think grammar is a lost art though, in fact, I think we're seeing a renewed interest in it by the number of grammar snobs that are cropping up. It's like the technologically literate are starting to push back against the illiterate that are infiltrating their domain. We went from using 1337 to set ourselves apart to using perfect grammar while online to set ourselves apart from the people that don't type as well as we do...
On websites other than this one, I just assume simple ignorance or not enough experience with typing, thereby making the person more likely to take shortcuts.

So when I see stories with very poor grammar and punctuation, bordering on chatspeak or textspeak or whatever these crazy kids call it these days... I question whether the author is telling the truth about being over the age of 18.
Seriously. Think about it a moment. Most of us have figured out by age 18 how to write, if not 100% correct, at least close enough to get by pretty well. The few exceptions I've found have been the kind of people that don't enjoy writing and wouldn't do it in their free time, or didn't have English as their first language. I don't think grammar is a lost art though, in fact, I think we're seeing a renewed interest in it by the number of grammar snobs that are cropping up. It's like the technologically literate are starting to push back against the illiterate that are infiltrating their domain. We went from using 1337 to set ourselves apart to using perfect grammar while online to set ourselves apart from the people that don't type as well as we do...
On websites other than this one, I just assume simple ignorance or not enough experience with typing, thereby making the person more likely to take shortcuts.

I tend to write F/SF, but yeah, I've been incorporating more and more horror into it. I'm trying to avoid self-censoring myself with the latest project. I do that too much, I think.

I keep a journal of all my dreams. After a few years of doing this, my dreams started getting more vivid and detailed (or I started filling in the gaps immediately upon waking up, use your best theory here), to the point where most of my writing is just ripping stories straight out of my diary. I have beautiful, terrible, complicated worlds in my head and I get to walk through them and play my role, and this is what gets written down.
And the nightmares get written down just so I can get them somewhere OTHER than my head, because holy shit can they get bad sometimes.

I would be interested in seeing this. I feel like there's three metrics to care about: page views, which counts how many people clicked on the story. Readers, or the people that not only clicked, but kept reading. And reviews, which are people that clicked, read, and then had an opinion they thought worth typing up. The last one is the hardest to get, I feel, as commentary takes a bit of an effort and some people may enjoy a story but feel they have nothing to contribute in the terms of a review. Having that in-between stat to tell if it's being read or not would be lovely.
And does anyone feel that the codes are more important than the story description...? Because I sacrificed codes in favor of more text about the story and I don't think it's working.