Post by Beelzebibble on Jun 14, 2007 21:36:47 GMT -5
I was originally going to post this once I had finished proofreading everything in the first batch of archived RPs, but I have run out of patience and therefore decided to post it now. Because you see it takes a lot of patience and a lot of proofreading to slog through the Writing Archive. And that is what I wish to address.
I know that none of you (well, I hope) are guilty of any of the following errors all the time -- when writing essays and such. Even looking into Fiction and Poetry I see a level of writing that is stepped up from the RP boards, even though it's being produced by the same people. But if anything, you ought to care more about bringing up the standard of RP writing than of anything else, since poor writing there has the double drawback of (1) making it more difficult for other people to read and thus add on to your writing and (2) making the whole story feel inconsistent and fragmented when read at one go.
I'll say only one more thing before starting in. Please don't be offended by anything below. Pohatu loves you all an awful lot and don't forget it. It's just that Pohatu also loves his sanity an awful lot and he feels it's very important to keep it intact. So he has to get a few things off his chest. Just listen real close for a couple of minutes and then you can go back to complaining about lack of activity on the boards, okay?
PRESENT ACTIVE PARTICIPLE
Let me define that for the non-language-geeks here: the present active participle is that form of a verb that ends in “-ing”. And lo, the people of Archipelago Exodus are enamored of the present active participle. There are some otherwise terrific writers here that (on the RP boards, at least) are hopelessly addicted. I place the present active participle first on the list because I think it is the most frequent problem I face in the Archive.
(I should also quickly clarify that the present active participle does not mean nouns such as “your writing” or adjectives such as “screeching halt”.)
The problem with the present active participle is that it brings your writing to a screeching halt. The reader is essentially frozen in time, forced to wait for the writer to continue. All the verbs have been squished together into one moment. This is fine in certain scenarios when you actually want us to take in all the verbs simultaneously. For instance:
“Her hands began to glow, surging with magical force.”
The two clauses are directly connected to each other. We’re supposed to perceive them both at the same time. But compare that sentence to this one (these sentences were made up, by the way):
“‘Let’s roll!’ he shouted, jumping onto his motorbike, revving up the engine, and shooting off.”
That is a sequence of events. They clearly do not all happen at the same time. But by expressing the verbs as present active participles, the author has forced them together even if s/he didn’t mean to do so. The sentence is much improved when we remove two of the present active participles, as below:
“‘Let’s roll!’ he shouted, jumping onto his motorbike. He revved up the engine and shot off.”
And don’t forget about the word “while”. “While” is your friend. “While” allows you to present two simultaneous actions and still avoid the present active participle. Look at a sentence like “He smiled faintly while his shadow chuckled”. I know, right? It’s a godsend! On the other hand, the word “before” is quite often not your friend. Not in sentences like “She picked her head up and put it back on her shoulders before dashing at her attacker”. Again, you’re just trying to avoid the sequence. Don’t avoid the sequence. Let it wash over you and douse you in sequential love.
PLURALS
For the love of god, don’t construct plurals by slapping a ’s onto the end of the word. You only do that for letters of the alphabet or numbers. If you want to write about a group of copies of the letter D (or if you want to describe the grades you got in English last term), you call them “D’s”. But if you want to write about someone’s eyes – a deliberate example, as this is the most common offender – don’t call them “eye’s”. It gets really easy to confuse with the possessive and it’s just ugly besides.
And make sure words like “abilities” and “energies” get spelled that way instead of as “abilitys” and “energys”. Again, deliberate choices, since those words get used a lot here.
RUN-ON SENTENCES
What is the fascination with run-on sentences? A couple of members here are absolute fiends when it comes to run-on sentences. As I have trekked through the RP Archive on my campaign to edit your posts, I’ve seen strings of as many as four clauses, each a sentence in its own right, fused together horribly like Siamese twins. (Or… quadruplets.) This isn’t just some anal-retentive grammar stipulation. Run-on sentences actually make your writing worse for a very concrete reason. That reason is:
Commas are weak. Periods are strong.
The following sentence comes from a post written by Prime in the topic “Genesis”, before I revised it. I don’t mean to attack Prime himself here; it’s just that his sentence serves as a perfect example of how much stronger a run-on sentence can become when you break it apart.
The original post was: “Very well, I warned you, this is my limit.”
Revised, it became: “Very well. I warned you: this is my limit.”
Each one of those phrases, by itself, has a lot of strength. To join them together with commas and keep the sentence running dampens that strength. The reader instinctively assumes that the greatest force is going to lie at the end of the sentence, so he skips over “Very well” and “I warned you” and rushes straight to “this is my limit”. By replacing the two commas with a period and a colon, every chunk of the sentence has been given the attention it deserves. The timing is improved as well. It’s much more formidable overall, which I think is what Prime was going for.
INDENT INDENT INDENT
Run-on sentences are bad enough. But what about run-on paragraphs? No one wants to read all the way through a paragraph the size of his head. You can get away with it in fiction sometimes. Heck, in “These Roses and This Plea” I only used one paragraph for each of the real-life scenes. But [pretentious]that was intended to create a stream-of-consciousness feel that captured the blurry, rapid way most of our minds run, as an ironic contrast to the solid, tangible, harshly-divided lines of dialogue taking place in Jacob’s mind[/pretentious]. Forgive me for saying this, but I think that sort of undertaking falls pretty exclusively in the domain of the Fiction and Poetry board.
Most of the time, in RP, the intent is simply to write what happened and how. I’m not saying there’s no good writing on these RP boards – far from it! – but that RPers rarely get up to the sort of lofty thematic shenanigans I described above. Consequently, it is in most cases a really bad idea to write in gargantuan paragraphs.
And it's nearly always a really bad idea to string two or more gargantuan paragraphs together in a row. Keep your paragraph length varied. Helps hold the reader's interest. We're lazy, you know.
An indent achieves much the same effect as a period. Like a period, an indent places a huge amount of emphasis on whatever was written at the end of the preceding paragraph. Like a period, an indent creates a space for the reader to breathe and take in what just occurred before continuing. Like a period, an indent tailors the timing of the text to whatever you, as the writer, want.
Not to mention, of course, that in some cases it is virtually inexcusable not to create a new paragraph, particularly when you’re writing dialogue. Don’t make two different people speak in the same paragraph.
HOW TO END SPOKEN SENTENCES!
“I love you.” He said.
BZZZZZT! YOU ARE WRONG AND STUPID!
“I love you,” he said.
DING-DING-DING! YOU WIN BROWNIES!
“BEGAN TO”, “SEEMED TO”, ETC.
Those two phrases and their respective families are big favorites on this board. Which is understandable: such phrases are really easy to turn to and difficult to avoid. And there are, of course, occasions when it is necessary to invoke them. But more often than not they can be removed without any damage to the writing. More importantly, such phrases weaken your writing if used wantonly, just as commas do. A sentence like “The balloon began to rise into the air” is much more wishy-washy than “The balloon rose into the air”.
On top of that, “seemed to” and its ilk (including adverbs like “apparently”, and just generally vague words like “somewhere”) have another potential problem. Keep the perspective of your writing in mind. If you are writing directly from the viewpoint of the character you’re describing, there is no need to resort to phrases like “seemed to”. Consider another example which should in no way be construed as an attack on ch00beh:
The first post of ch00beh’s topic “The Dark Materials” originally included the sentence “His other hand held an ornate golden goblet, presumably filled with wine, to his mouth.”
All well and good, except that the “presumably” has no business there. The character ch00beh is describing, Artifex, is plainly the one from whose perspective he is writing. No other characters have been introduced so far (or indeed get introduced for the rest of the post). Artifex knows full well what’s in the ornate golden goblet. Either it is wine or it isn’t. The inclusion of “presumably” sticks the reader in where s/he shouldn’t be, as another figure watching Artifex from a distance, instead of as Artifex himself.
“SAID”, “ASKED”, ETC.
There are people on this board who insist on ending every individual spoken sentence with a tag such as “he said”, “she asked”, and so on. I don’t mean at the end of every line of dialogue. I mean at the end of every individual spoken sentence. Things like (made-up example, but it’s no worse than the truth):
“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “But what about the hyenas?” he asked. “If they catch up with us, it’s all over,” he said.
I think it goes without saying that this is staggeringly unneccessary, and very poor form. Tags such as this aren’t usually vital to begin with. I’ve read some absolutely fantastic books that hardly use tags at all (A Handful of Dust, anyone?). But even if you do use one tag in a line of dialogue, you positively do not need to use any more, ever.
While we’re on the subject I should also mention the issue of redundant tags. I hope that the problem with such phrases as “‘Shit!’ she cursed” and “‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized” will be immediately obvious to everyone. Technically I suppose that “asked” would be a redundant tag on any sentence ending with a question mark, but “asked” is unassuming enough to slip under even the radars of the nitpickiest grammarians, like me. More exciting words like “cursed” and “apologized” cannot do the same.
SENTENCE SUBJECTS
Insert the usual disclaimer about this not being an attack on Aurora.
“Slowly, and silently Rin drew his, Aikuchi, the blade he had owned since he was five years old, both hands gripped the hilt, and in a silent move Rin had stepped out the shadow, skipped a couple of stepped and lunged his sword into the guard’s lower back, he made little sound, and the sound he did make was silenced, one Rin’s hands covering the now deceased mouth, the other pushing the blade further into the body, to ensure the kill.”
This was the original form of a sentence Aurora wrote in the topic “Tempering the blades”. First off, it’s an unbelievable run-on sentence (and there are some nasty present active participles toward the end). But there’s another problem here that, although it frequently does go hand-in-hand with absurdly long sentences, can haunt even sentences of no more than two clauses. What’s wrong?
Take a look at the subject of each chunk of the sentence. Our first subject is Rin. Then his hands become the subject. Then Rin becomes the subject again. Then the guard becomes the subject. Then Rin’s hands become the subject one more time.
It’s messy. Really messy. Of course, it could be fixed by dissolving this gargantuan sentence into smaller components, but like I said, this is just an extreme example. There’s a lot of subject confusion going on in even the shorter sentences in the Archive.
Pick a subject and stick to it. If you want to switch to a different subject, start a new sentence, or at least use a semicolon instead of a comma. I cannot make this any simpler.
MEASUREMENTS
Visual descriptions in this forum will occasionally include measurements such as “6 feet 2 inches” or “20 feet away”. I have always been perplexed by this. I don’t know about your characters who may after all have tape measures for brains but I never think about heights, weights, distances, etc. in terms of specific numbers. To me, 6 feet 2 inches is “quite tall”. 20 feet away is “a short distance away”. It’s just unrealistic to put in measurements like this when it’s quite obvious your character doesn’t have the means to precisely pinpoint such a value. It reminds the reader that s/he is not viewing a story through the eyes of a real being, but is instead looking at the result of a writer sitting at the computer and deciding on a number.
Speaking of numbers, it’s bad form in this context to write numbers as digits. Better by far to write them as “one, two, three,” etc. Obviously it would be too clumsy to express decimal numbers this way, but for integers, it looks much smoother.
BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL
Yes, there’s a fourth wall in writing, just as much so as in acting. Don’t speak to the reader directly with things like “You could hear it from a mile away”. That’s too conversational, and has no place in the narrative – unless you really mean to address the reader as the specific purpose of your text, like I’m doing right now.
Usually “you” could be replaced with “one” without much of a problem. Of course, that has the potential to turn out some real clunkers like “One could see it with one’s naked eyes”. If you should ever find yourself using the word “one’s”, trust me on this: Scrap the sentence and start over before you hurt yourself.
-WARD VERSUS -WARDS
This is a little thing, but those words are so pervasive on these boards that I need to point it out. People tell you that these suffixes (in words like “forward/s”, “backward/s”, “toward/s”, “inward/s”, “outward/s”, etc.) are interchangeable. Yeah… except that “-wards” looks stupid. There’s no context in which it is necessary to use “-wards” instead of the simpler and cleaner “-ward”. Stick with “-ward”.
ENERGY
Boy, the idea of “energy” as some kind of crackling, glowing power that inexplicably has concussive force even though it appears to be nothing more than light is handy, isn’t it? What did writers do before that concept was invented? The genre of fantasy was clearly a barren wasteland until this hip new definition of “energy” hit the literary scene. I mean, heck, I always thought “energy” meant “the capacity for vigorous activity; available power” or “an adequate or abundant amount of such power”, but I guess only stupid doodyfaces use those definitions any more, eh?
Listen. People. You are falling back on this word over and over again. It is not a tool any more. It is a crutch. LET IT GO. STOP USING IT IN EVERY POST. All I see in RP battles is your characters chucking energy at each other. Energy balls, energy beams, energy waves. I can’t stand it.
“But Uncle Pohatu, I can’t come up with a better word for it than ‘energy’!” Tell you what: How about you come up with a better attack? Maybe something OMG creative? Or is that not possible? Prove me wrong on this one, okay guys?
THE VERB “TO SCAN”
You guys are really fond of the verb “to scan”. Really, really fond. Unless your character is a fax machine, you might want to consider a synonym.
To note other cliched verbs, your characters do way the hell too much rolling around (have you tried rolling forward on the ground in a fight? have you noticed that it's both painful and clumsy?), slashing (this is the only verb I ever see out of you swordy types... no, seriously, the only one), and propelling themselves forward (does your character have built-in jet engines? paddle wheels? ion thrusters? no? okay, maybe you should cut back on this word then).
SPELLING MISCELLANEA
“I’m definatly stronger then you! I have the origional Lightening Sickle and my collossal attack will make you dissapear! You’re spells dont phase me in the least! Their’s nothing you can do, for I am a genious!”
BZZZZZT! YOU ARE WRONG AND STUPID!
“I’m definitely stronger than you! I have the original Lightning Sickle and my colossal attack will make you disappear! Your spells don’t faze me in the least! There’s nothing you can do, for I am a genius!”
DING-DING-DING! GIVE THE LITTLE MAN A BIG CIGAR!
I know that none of you (well, I hope) are guilty of any of the following errors all the time -- when writing essays and such. Even looking into Fiction and Poetry I see a level of writing that is stepped up from the RP boards, even though it's being produced by the same people. But if anything, you ought to care more about bringing up the standard of RP writing than of anything else, since poor writing there has the double drawback of (1) making it more difficult for other people to read and thus add on to your writing and (2) making the whole story feel inconsistent and fragmented when read at one go.
I'll say only one more thing before starting in. Please don't be offended by anything below. Pohatu loves you all an awful lot and don't forget it. It's just that Pohatu also loves his sanity an awful lot and he feels it's very important to keep it intact. So he has to get a few things off his chest. Just listen real close for a couple of minutes and then you can go back to complaining about lack of activity on the boards, okay?
PRESENT ACTIVE PARTICIPLE
Let me define that for the non-language-geeks here: the present active participle is that form of a verb that ends in “-ing”. And lo, the people of Archipelago Exodus are enamored of the present active participle. There are some otherwise terrific writers here that (on the RP boards, at least) are hopelessly addicted. I place the present active participle first on the list because I think it is the most frequent problem I face in the Archive.
(I should also quickly clarify that the present active participle does not mean nouns such as “your writing” or adjectives such as “screeching halt”.)
The problem with the present active participle is that it brings your writing to a screeching halt. The reader is essentially frozen in time, forced to wait for the writer to continue. All the verbs have been squished together into one moment. This is fine in certain scenarios when you actually want us to take in all the verbs simultaneously. For instance:
“Her hands began to glow, surging with magical force.”
The two clauses are directly connected to each other. We’re supposed to perceive them both at the same time. But compare that sentence to this one (these sentences were made up, by the way):
“‘Let’s roll!’ he shouted, jumping onto his motorbike, revving up the engine, and shooting off.”
That is a sequence of events. They clearly do not all happen at the same time. But by expressing the verbs as present active participles, the author has forced them together even if s/he didn’t mean to do so. The sentence is much improved when we remove two of the present active participles, as below:
“‘Let’s roll!’ he shouted, jumping onto his motorbike. He revved up the engine and shot off.”
And don’t forget about the word “while”. “While” is your friend. “While” allows you to present two simultaneous actions and still avoid the present active participle. Look at a sentence like “He smiled faintly while his shadow chuckled”. I know, right? It’s a godsend! On the other hand, the word “before” is quite often not your friend. Not in sentences like “She picked her head up and put it back on her shoulders before dashing at her attacker”. Again, you’re just trying to avoid the sequence. Don’t avoid the sequence. Let it wash over you and douse you in sequential love.
PLURALS
For the love of god, don’t construct plurals by slapping a ’s onto the end of the word. You only do that for letters of the alphabet or numbers. If you want to write about a group of copies of the letter D (or if you want to describe the grades you got in English last term), you call them “D’s”. But if you want to write about someone’s eyes – a deliberate example, as this is the most common offender – don’t call them “eye’s”. It gets really easy to confuse with the possessive and it’s just ugly besides.
And make sure words like “abilities” and “energies” get spelled that way instead of as “abilitys” and “energys”. Again, deliberate choices, since those words get used a lot here.
RUN-ON SENTENCES
What is the fascination with run-on sentences? A couple of members here are absolute fiends when it comes to run-on sentences. As I have trekked through the RP Archive on my campaign to edit your posts, I’ve seen strings of as many as four clauses, each a sentence in its own right, fused together horribly like Siamese twins. (Or… quadruplets.) This isn’t just some anal-retentive grammar stipulation. Run-on sentences actually make your writing worse for a very concrete reason. That reason is:
Commas are weak. Periods are strong.
The following sentence comes from a post written by Prime in the topic “Genesis”, before I revised it. I don’t mean to attack Prime himself here; it’s just that his sentence serves as a perfect example of how much stronger a run-on sentence can become when you break it apart.
The original post was: “Very well, I warned you, this is my limit.”
Revised, it became: “Very well. I warned you: this is my limit.”
Each one of those phrases, by itself, has a lot of strength. To join them together with commas and keep the sentence running dampens that strength. The reader instinctively assumes that the greatest force is going to lie at the end of the sentence, so he skips over “Very well” and “I warned you” and rushes straight to “this is my limit”. By replacing the two commas with a period and a colon, every chunk of the sentence has been given the attention it deserves. The timing is improved as well. It’s much more formidable overall, which I think is what Prime was going for.
INDENT INDENT INDENT
Run-on sentences are bad enough. But what about run-on paragraphs? No one wants to read all the way through a paragraph the size of his head. You can get away with it in fiction sometimes. Heck, in “These Roses and This Plea” I only used one paragraph for each of the real-life scenes. But [pretentious]that was intended to create a stream-of-consciousness feel that captured the blurry, rapid way most of our minds run, as an ironic contrast to the solid, tangible, harshly-divided lines of dialogue taking place in Jacob’s mind[/pretentious]. Forgive me for saying this, but I think that sort of undertaking falls pretty exclusively in the domain of the Fiction and Poetry board.
Most of the time, in RP, the intent is simply to write what happened and how. I’m not saying there’s no good writing on these RP boards – far from it! – but that RPers rarely get up to the sort of lofty thematic shenanigans I described above. Consequently, it is in most cases a really bad idea to write in gargantuan paragraphs.
And it's nearly always a really bad idea to string two or more gargantuan paragraphs together in a row. Keep your paragraph length varied. Helps hold the reader's interest. We're lazy, you know.
An indent achieves much the same effect as a period. Like a period, an indent places a huge amount of emphasis on whatever was written at the end of the preceding paragraph. Like a period, an indent creates a space for the reader to breathe and take in what just occurred before continuing. Like a period, an indent tailors the timing of the text to whatever you, as the writer, want.
Not to mention, of course, that in some cases it is virtually inexcusable not to create a new paragraph, particularly when you’re writing dialogue. Don’t make two different people speak in the same paragraph.
HOW TO END SPOKEN SENTENCES!
“I love you.” He said.
BZZZZZT! YOU ARE WRONG AND STUPID!
“I love you,” he said.
DING-DING-DING! YOU WIN BROWNIES!
“BEGAN TO”, “SEEMED TO”, ETC.
Those two phrases and their respective families are big favorites on this board. Which is understandable: such phrases are really easy to turn to and difficult to avoid. And there are, of course, occasions when it is necessary to invoke them. But more often than not they can be removed without any damage to the writing. More importantly, such phrases weaken your writing if used wantonly, just as commas do. A sentence like “The balloon began to rise into the air” is much more wishy-washy than “The balloon rose into the air”.
On top of that, “seemed to” and its ilk (including adverbs like “apparently”, and just generally vague words like “somewhere”) have another potential problem. Keep the perspective of your writing in mind. If you are writing directly from the viewpoint of the character you’re describing, there is no need to resort to phrases like “seemed to”. Consider another example which should in no way be construed as an attack on ch00beh:
The first post of ch00beh’s topic “The Dark Materials” originally included the sentence “His other hand held an ornate golden goblet, presumably filled with wine, to his mouth.”
All well and good, except that the “presumably” has no business there. The character ch00beh is describing, Artifex, is plainly the one from whose perspective he is writing. No other characters have been introduced so far (or indeed get introduced for the rest of the post). Artifex knows full well what’s in the ornate golden goblet. Either it is wine or it isn’t. The inclusion of “presumably” sticks the reader in where s/he shouldn’t be, as another figure watching Artifex from a distance, instead of as Artifex himself.
“SAID”, “ASKED”, ETC.
There are people on this board who insist on ending every individual spoken sentence with a tag such as “he said”, “she asked”, and so on. I don’t mean at the end of every line of dialogue. I mean at the end of every individual spoken sentence. Things like (made-up example, but it’s no worse than the truth):
“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “But what about the hyenas?” he asked. “If they catch up with us, it’s all over,” he said.
I think it goes without saying that this is staggeringly unneccessary, and very poor form. Tags such as this aren’t usually vital to begin with. I’ve read some absolutely fantastic books that hardly use tags at all (A Handful of Dust, anyone?). But even if you do use one tag in a line of dialogue, you positively do not need to use any more, ever.
While we’re on the subject I should also mention the issue of redundant tags. I hope that the problem with such phrases as “‘Shit!’ she cursed” and “‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized” will be immediately obvious to everyone. Technically I suppose that “asked” would be a redundant tag on any sentence ending with a question mark, but “asked” is unassuming enough to slip under even the radars of the nitpickiest grammarians, like me. More exciting words like “cursed” and “apologized” cannot do the same.
SENTENCE SUBJECTS
Insert the usual disclaimer about this not being an attack on Aurora.
“Slowly, and silently Rin drew his, Aikuchi, the blade he had owned since he was five years old, both hands gripped the hilt, and in a silent move Rin had stepped out the shadow, skipped a couple of stepped and lunged his sword into the guard’s lower back, he made little sound, and the sound he did make was silenced, one Rin’s hands covering the now deceased mouth, the other pushing the blade further into the body, to ensure the kill.”
This was the original form of a sentence Aurora wrote in the topic “Tempering the blades”. First off, it’s an unbelievable run-on sentence (and there are some nasty present active participles toward the end). But there’s another problem here that, although it frequently does go hand-in-hand with absurdly long sentences, can haunt even sentences of no more than two clauses. What’s wrong?
Take a look at the subject of each chunk of the sentence. Our first subject is Rin. Then his hands become the subject. Then Rin becomes the subject again. Then the guard becomes the subject. Then Rin’s hands become the subject one more time.
It’s messy. Really messy. Of course, it could be fixed by dissolving this gargantuan sentence into smaller components, but like I said, this is just an extreme example. There’s a lot of subject confusion going on in even the shorter sentences in the Archive.
Pick a subject and stick to it. If you want to switch to a different subject, start a new sentence, or at least use a semicolon instead of a comma. I cannot make this any simpler.
MEASUREMENTS
Visual descriptions in this forum will occasionally include measurements such as “6 feet 2 inches” or “20 feet away”. I have always been perplexed by this. I don’t know about your characters who may after all have tape measures for brains but I never think about heights, weights, distances, etc. in terms of specific numbers. To me, 6 feet 2 inches is “quite tall”. 20 feet away is “a short distance away”. It’s just unrealistic to put in measurements like this when it’s quite obvious your character doesn’t have the means to precisely pinpoint such a value. It reminds the reader that s/he is not viewing a story through the eyes of a real being, but is instead looking at the result of a writer sitting at the computer and deciding on a number.
Speaking of numbers, it’s bad form in this context to write numbers as digits. Better by far to write them as “one, two, three,” etc. Obviously it would be too clumsy to express decimal numbers this way, but for integers, it looks much smoother.
BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL
Yes, there’s a fourth wall in writing, just as much so as in acting. Don’t speak to the reader directly with things like “You could hear it from a mile away”. That’s too conversational, and has no place in the narrative – unless you really mean to address the reader as the specific purpose of your text, like I’m doing right now.
Usually “you” could be replaced with “one” without much of a problem. Of course, that has the potential to turn out some real clunkers like “One could see it with one’s naked eyes”. If you should ever find yourself using the word “one’s”, trust me on this: Scrap the sentence and start over before you hurt yourself.
-WARD VERSUS -WARDS
This is a little thing, but those words are so pervasive on these boards that I need to point it out. People tell you that these suffixes (in words like “forward/s”, “backward/s”, “toward/s”, “inward/s”, “outward/s”, etc.) are interchangeable. Yeah… except that “-wards” looks stupid. There’s no context in which it is necessary to use “-wards” instead of the simpler and cleaner “-ward”. Stick with “-ward”.
ENERGY
Boy, the idea of “energy” as some kind of crackling, glowing power that inexplicably has concussive force even though it appears to be nothing more than light is handy, isn’t it? What did writers do before that concept was invented? The genre of fantasy was clearly a barren wasteland until this hip new definition of “energy” hit the literary scene. I mean, heck, I always thought “energy” meant “the capacity for vigorous activity; available power” or “an adequate or abundant amount of such power”, but I guess only stupid doodyfaces use those definitions any more, eh?
Listen. People. You are falling back on this word over and over again. It is not a tool any more. It is a crutch. LET IT GO. STOP USING IT IN EVERY POST. All I see in RP battles is your characters chucking energy at each other. Energy balls, energy beams, energy waves. I can’t stand it.
“But Uncle Pohatu, I can’t come up with a better word for it than ‘energy’!” Tell you what: How about you come up with a better attack? Maybe something OMG creative? Or is that not possible? Prove me wrong on this one, okay guys?
THE VERB “TO SCAN”
You guys are really fond of the verb “to scan”. Really, really fond. Unless your character is a fax machine, you might want to consider a synonym.
To note other cliched verbs, your characters do way the hell too much rolling around (have you tried rolling forward on the ground in a fight? have you noticed that it's both painful and clumsy?), slashing (this is the only verb I ever see out of you swordy types... no, seriously, the only one), and propelling themselves forward (does your character have built-in jet engines? paddle wheels? ion thrusters? no? okay, maybe you should cut back on this word then).
SPELLING MISCELLANEA
“I’m definatly stronger then you! I have the origional Lightening Sickle and my collossal attack will make you dissapear! You’re spells dont phase me in the least! Their’s nothing you can do, for I am a genious!”
BZZZZZT! YOU ARE WRONG AND STUPID!
“I’m definitely stronger than you! I have the original Lightning Sickle and my colossal attack will make you disappear! Your spells don’t faze me in the least! There’s nothing you can do, for I am a genius!”
DING-DING-DING! GIVE THE LITTLE MAN A BIG CIGAR!