Congrats to @wrestlingdesires and to others who were mentioned. You have all done extremely great to have showed up here...
This week topic is a great one and what we can all danced to. Lost can be written so well and has lots of topic deep in it.
@theinkwell , I just need to make a little observations:
Sometimes when I newly joined this Community, there were members coming out with tangible comment about words usage and also were there to correct every mistakes one has made. They even went to the extent of pointing out those words wrongly spelt or wrongly placed. Now I can't see anyone coming up to make such corrections in any post I have visited so far and if I do, I don't know what the writer may pour out to me because we are all bound to make mistake in one way or the other. We are not island of knowledge and cannot know all but we can at least know to our best knowledge.
@cool08 How deeply did you analyze that, it is established that you are a good writer, as I know about myself, it is possible that some spelling may be wrong or there may be a difference of tense, anyway every country Citizens may have a different writing style, their slang, their limitations, their environment, their systems, their preferences, their perspectives, but still we want to reach our feelings through these short stories and possibly have been reaching them.
I would warmly welcome you if you would like to tell me about my shortcomings.
There is a saying in our country that the one who criticizes us should be given a room in the courtyard of our house.
That is a wonderful saying. In order to grow we need to understand the ways in which we can grow.
I agree with your sentiment completely here. Of course broken style and poor grammar interfere with a reader's enjoyment of a story. However, I personally always ask myself, what does the story mean? Is this author trying to saying anything of value?
Writing is a vehicle. We share our lives, our experiences, our perspectives through writing. That is its value to me. When I read a story I hope to be moved in some way. If that happens, I consider the story to be 'good'.
Exactly. If I felt something because of the story, it was time well spent ♥️
!PIZZA !ALIVE
I'm glad you are looking to always keep learning 🙌🙌🙌
I feel the same way :)
Hi @cool08. We used to provide more feedback on wording and grammar. But it takes too much time. Are you saying that you wish we would provide more corrections?
I have not been seeing that old time again. I have seen so many write ups with too many grammatical errors, I'm not perfect, but to my knowledge. Back in the days, you use to make corrections on write ups, but now everything has changed.
I now understand you better. You are right about the time factor. The Community is growing seriously.
Hello @cool08,
I am hoping you mean that you don't want us to micromanage your stories. I personally (and when I comment as Inkwell) don't see that as my function. Sometimes if I think a writer can benefit from technical advice about structure, or POV, I will try to help out. However, mostly we don't correct grammar. Perhaps one or two words in a story that otherwise is intact.
Many of our writers are new to the English language. Many use translators. It wouldn't be practical to try and correct usage and grammar in such situations. So, besides making general suggestions, and offering one or two tips, I will comment on readability, coherence, adherence to prompt/skill, and overall engagement value.
I hope this addresses your concern. We value your participation and interest. Looking forward to your 'lost' post this week.
Thanks for your keen explanations.
@jayna and @agmoore
I do wonder about some of the merits of what cool08 is getting at though. I feel that when I make constructive criticisms on the work of others, I get ready for a conversation. On one quite long comment I left recently, I asked for engagement back, and all I got was a 'Thanks'. That said, I don't think the responsibility should fall on the Ink Well team - but rather its members to be engaging in feedback processes.
To cool08, I went back and looked at the comments you left for others in The Ink Well last week - you made a general comment about the topic of the writer's post, but nothing concrete about the story or mechanics of the language itself. What an opportunity for you to offer something tangible moving forward, in the hope of being able to exchange ideas with others. I often do this by offering, 'I wonder...' - you're welcome to take on these words and make them your own.
That doesn't mean the comment didn't have value for the author. Hard to tell by a lack of response. Keep in mind that when you make a comment it is not only the author who reads it. Others may also benefit, so nothing is 'wasted'.
Keep them coming. Meaningful comments from the community are valuable.
I love this discussion! I think feedback designed to support others' development and understanding of different techniques in fiction writing is wonderful. We are not staffed to provide extensive feedback, unfortunately.
However, as you say, @lordtimoty, the community members should be supporting one another with feedback. (That said, some are open to it, and some aren't, so we will all come up against that.) One possibility is that now that we have opened our Discord server to the community, we could consider opening a workshop channel where people can request feedback on their content prior to posting. It would have to be in a Google doc. We'd also need to see active engagement on Discord to know this would work. The admin team can't take on more. We all have active, busy lives... some of us are working full time and also writing our own content on/off Hive, etc.
Thanks so much for your kindness :)
Personally, I only tend to give constructive criticism if I know it will be taken as the help it's intended to be. Otherwise, I fear it might discourage the author.
!PIZZA !ALIVE !LOL