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[MrStoob]

Gisle-Aune wrote...

MrStoob wrote...

Anyhoo, on topic.

Asari physical maturity. I'm going for some time in the 40's age range. Is there anything more specific I should consider? I don't think there's anything canon, but I'm happy to be corrected.

Their cultural maturtiy - if that's the right term - is 60 years old[1]. Physical maturity isn't easy to tell. What makes them long-lived isn't the opposite of what the salarians have, which one can interpret as having the physical maturity around 20. It is at least before 42, since Ardat-Yakshi manifests at maturity and Falere's in the monastery at that age[2]. The length of Justicar training before the Oath of Solitude is also not anywhere in canon, and neither is how long Falere has been at the place, or if she was a late diagnosis.

1. Illium, asari near weapons kiosk talking to a salarian.
2. SB Dossiers / Samara

Good, good, and thanks.  I can continue with that chapter now   The asari in question would be around 36 so that suits my purpose/needs.

[MrStoob]

Am I being overly critical here? http://social.biowar.../index/15855521

[hot_heart]

Maybe a little harsh in your feedback.

By line-spacing do you mean the indent at the start of each new line?
Whether you use " or a single ' for speech seems more of a stylistic choice, going by what I've seen in books. A lot tend to use the latter, but I prefer the double.

[MrStoob]

I mean this mainly:

This is a sentence.
This is another sentence.
They'd normally be part of a paragraph if part of a common thread or event.
Even if choosing this style, it'd be nice to have the occasional line space.

Like this.

Modifié par MrStoob, 11 février 2013 - 01:59 .

[hot_heart]

Hmm, as far as I'm aware, that's not something you'd normally see in a book unless suggesting a change of time or scenery. What makes it a little easier on the eyes are the indents for each new carriage return.

Though, I do agree that there are instances where some lines would work perfectly well as one paragraph. At other times, it adds to the sense of urgency.

[Obsidian Gryphon]

I've to agree...it is messy. I didn't read either, one glance is enough.

[MrStoob]

hot_heart wrote...

Hmm, as far as I'm aware, that's not something you'd normally see in a book unless suggesting a change of time or scenery. What makes it a little easier on the eyes are the indents for each new carriage return.

Though, I do agree that there are instances where some lines would work perfectly well as one paragraph. At other times, it adds to the sense of urgency.

I can see that if you are not going to use line spaces then indents would be a must to distinguish new paragraphs, if using paragraphs...

And yes, for effect, single lines can be used such as you say there, for urgency, but all the way through the text is tiresome.  I will admit to being a bit of an English ****, being my first and only language.  Spelling, grammar and structure were the order of the day when I was at school, now slowly being degraded by... I'll leave it there.
:innocent:

[hot_heart]

Heh, I can be a bit of a stick in the mud about certain things, but I've seen instances where people bend the rules to their advantage. Plus, I'll readily admit that a lot of my own grammar usage is actually instinctive. Which does lead to terrible sentences on the odd occasion...

I only really helped them out because English isn't their first language and I could see there were some good bits in there. It wasn't just someone summarising their own action fantasy they had in their head (though, it wasn't too far from it).

On a semi-related note, that reminds me of this quiz that budding writers may find interesting/challenging. I got 13/14 because I didn't know what a gerund was, chose the correct answer by instinct but then second-guessed that and got it wrong.

[MrStoob]

hot_heart wrote...
I only really helped them out because English isn't their first language and I could see there were some good bits in there. 

I was aware English isn't their first lingo but all Euro languages write prose in pretty much the same manner, that's what I didn't quite get when they were resistent.

[MrStoob]

Ugh. I'm such a masochist.

I've written myself into a corner, once again. I've created a horrible 'set up' which for dramatic purposes is quite tense and the initial scenes dealing with it will be quite 'fun' to write. But do I have a resolution? Bah. Someone is going to get hurt quite terribly (emotionally) but I just can't find a resolution or decide who, or how the people in question might decide. It's not a pleasant scenario and despite knowing my characters, how anyone might deal with this would be hard.

I'd really appreciate some outside thoughts on the matter. Don't want to spoiler here so can anyone who has time pm so I can bounce a few ideas, please? Thanks.

[hot_heart]

MrStoob wrote...
I was aware English isn't their first lingo but all Euro languages write prose in pretty much the same manner, that's what I didn't quite get when they were resistent.

But there was nothing outrageously wrong about their formatting. Line breaks are not used for a contained scene such as that, carriage returns aid the first-person immediacy, and speech marks can be " or ' depending on preference.

It was the absence of indents that caused the real problem. Sites like FF.net differe because they lose them while adding double line spacing instead, and have the benefit of a much wider screen.

I'm not disagreeing that some of the sentences could have run together, or that their use of italics was a little off-putting, but those weren't really the main issue.

Of course, some people will be inclined not to agree with someone else, based purely on the other person's tone.

Modifié par hot_heart, 12 février 2013 - 04:54 .

[MrStoob]

hot_heart wrote...
Of course, some people will be inclined not to agree with someone else, based purely on the other person's tone.

:innocent:
Fair do's.  Pass the humble pie, please.

[hot_heart]

Hehe, I don't mean the fault lies entirely with one party. It's just easy to get defensive when criticism is being dealt. It's a natural reaction.

[MrStoob]

Nah, I felt I went a bit overboard, hence asking for a qualifier from here before I went any further. And my observation skills must be crap: every novel I open at home has zero line spaces and indents rather than the style I seem to have assumed. Nowt wrong with accepting failings.

[fluffywalrus]

MrStoob wrote...

Nah, I felt I went a bit overboard, hence asking for a qualifier from here before I went any further. And my observation skills must be crap: every novel I open at home has zero line spaces and indents rather than the style I seem to have assumed. Nowt wrong with accepting failings.

Just going to add in that there's a vast difference between reading a physical book, and reading something on a screen in digital form. It's why serif typography is used in print, and sans serif on web sites and PDFs and everything.

Go to pretty much any news website, anything with articles, and you'll find the writing to be broken up into paragraphs, and line breaks added here and there. Open up something like the "A Song of Ice and Fire" series, and you're not going to see that kind of thing too often. Different expectations, and a different format. Books are on pages that are usually thinner than our monitor displays. Thin-moderate columns of text are easy to digest, it's why you see them in newspapers that tend to have larger pages. On websites and everything, the wider screen space for text can jumble the flow of how one can read blocks of text. A block of text in a book is easy to read in comparison to a block of text on something like ffnet. Formatting is imperative in digital publishing, as it helps guide people's eyes, it helps make content easier to read. It's why there are more line breaks, it's why there are more indents, it's why they use sans serif.

For someone to disregard the difference as trivial and expect to have their work tranfer seamlessly is IMO a grave error. I checked the guy's writing, and IMO including indents would have helped, might have made it readable for me, but it still would have been hard on my eyes. Content doesn't work in a vacuum. Formatting is essential in getting that content across to people. In the same way that I rarely read stories where people misspell known names multiple times per chapter, I will rarely read poorly formatted stories.

[hot_heart]

Yeah, I think we've essentially agreed that the formatting was a major barrier to reading it. While he was following certain established rules, there was one fatal (and major) flaw which rendered it almost unreadable.

I think some of it may be down to however it was converted and whatever DA does. I did advise them to use FF.net.

[MrStoob]

Aye. Felt compelled to send the poor dude a pm to apologise for being an arse lol. He was good about it thankfully.

[MrStoob]

fluffywalrus wrote...
In the same way that I rarely read stories where people misspell known names multiple times per chapter, I will rarely read poorly formatted stories. 

Damn, you were generous with me then lol.  I've discovered many an assumed spelling (due to not playing with subtitles and well... assuming).  Rila, Felere, etc.

Edit: there's an old saying about being careful who you step on when you're on the way up.  ashtrails is the person who does art requests and I'd asked for one ages ago.  He/she has started a new round and I thought "Ooh great!  They're starting to do requests again", then looked at the name... and felt even more stupid.

Modifié par MrStoob, 13 février 2013 - 12:33 .

[Obsidian Gryphon]

Trust me, MrStoob, when I say this ... stupidity is a universal trait...  :lol::lol: *ducks*

Modifié par Obsidian Gryphon, 13 février 2013 - 01:40 .

[fluffywalrus]

MrStoob wrote...

fluffywalrus wrote...
In the same way that I rarely read stories where people misspell known names multiple times per chapter, I will rarely read poorly formatted stories. 

Damn, you were generous with me then lol.  I've discovered many an assumed spelling (due to not playing with subtitles and well... assuming).  Rila, Felere, etc.

Edit: there's an old saying about being careful who you step on when you're on the way up.  ashtrails is the person who does art requests and I'd asked for one ages ago.  He/she has started a new round and I thought "Ooh great!  They're starting to do requests again", then looked at the name... and felt even more stupid.

Haha, yeah, I can be generous at times. It's all in moderation, and how invested i am in the story.

There was one fic where in the first chapter, the author misspelled:
Shepard (Shepherd)
Chakwas (Chawkwas)
Garrus (Garris)
Councilor Sparatus (Spartas)
Arcturus Station  (Arctis Station)
Wrex (Rex)
And a bunch of others I'm forgetting, but it was pretty bad. It's a moderate pet peeve of mine because Mass Effect wikia is there for everyone's perusal, and it takes a few seconds to see if you have it right. If you don't, it's a quick find and replace in microsoft word to change it all up. I just figure, it's alright to guess based on phonetics when you're doing a draft, but if you're submitting to somewhere like FFnet, it's not hard to go search up Mass Effect fics and check the character specific scrolldown list. Even just doing that would fix a lot. Taking a few minutes to  double check is great, at least for me because I'm a stickler (seriously, the amount of people who misspell Karin Chakwas's name is painful for me).

It's just because characters have names for a reason, and people associate experiences and emotions they have for those characters based on those names (at least when they're reading fanfiction). If someone starts off misspelling key character names, I might not catch it immediately. It could be a few seconds of confusion before I realize the error, and it just sucks for me, because I know that going forward from there, I'm going to have to use my brain to read and fully understand the fic rather than just reading it and absorbing the info as I normally do. It breaks immersion. It can make me sad
It would be like reading a star wars book and having to consistently stumble over "Honn Sowlo" and "Chewbacka" and "Darth Vayder" and "Princess Layah". I can forgive regular spelling mistakes to a larger degree, but characters? Known entities that people have attachments to? That's different. Once you start disassociating people's connections to those characters, it's hard to engage them in your story, I feel.

You slipped in a few spots, but not everywhere. That helped

Modifié par fluffywalrus, 13 février 2013 - 03:26 .

[hot_heart]

Just have to remember that Chakwas is an anagram of hacksaw. An instrument not used in 22nd century medicine, hopefully.

[ashtrails]

hot_heart wrote...



On a semi-related note, that reminds me of this quiz that budding writers may find interesting/challenging. I got 13/14 because I didn't know what a gerund was, chose the correct answer by instinct but then second-guessed that and got it wrong.

12/14, what the hell are abstract and collective nouns !?

MrStoob wrote...


Edit: there's an old saying about
being careful who you step on when you're on the way up.  ashtrails is
the person who does art requests and I'd asked for one ages ago.  He/she
has started a new round and I thought "Ooh great!  They're starting to
do requests again", then looked at the name... and felt even more
stupid.
[smilie]http://social.bioware.com/images/forum/emoticons/whistling.png[/smilie]

Karma, I guess ;D

That was basically what I meant when I said our judgement of other people's stories is influenced by what we know/assume about them.
It's hard to keep in mind almost everyone's got potential even if the first and only impression is rather repulsive.

Admittedly, this thought (and my initial confusion) were what put me into a defensive stance right away, since _not_ looking for potential, redeeming qualities or even enjoyment in exchange for 15 mildly painful minutes of reading time contradicts everything I learned  (or apply when I review things) on my ongoing uh...'writer's journey'.

That's more or less why I did dig my heels in instead of just saying 'alright, strg+a, format, double space/indent--->everyone's happy'


Just wanted to add those two cents as I'm part of the topic anyway ;--)

[hot_heart]

ashtrails wrote...
12/14, what the hell are abstract and collective nouns !?

An abstract noun is an idea or concept rather than a physical thing. Collective means the noun refers to a group of things.

Therefore, a 'Team' is a collective noun and 'Truth' is an abstract noun. 'Pride' can be either because it is an abstract concept or, alternatively, the name for a group of lions.

[ashtrails]

Heh, yeah, read it up afterward but still didn't get what was wrong with pride...never came across the alternative meaning.

[hot_heart]

Heh, the only other real clue is that if you knew two of them, you might guess that the third is the unused answer. That would be 'cheating' though.