Tannalein

346 reputation

bio	website
	location
	age	33
visits	member for	7 months
	seen	Jan 8 at 1:06
stats	profile views	7

	346 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	7 months
5 badges		location			seen	Jan 8 at 1:06

summary answers questions tags badges favorites bounties reputation activity

40 Comments

suggestions reviews revisions comments badges posts accepts all

Dec 19	comment	Should I translate my own writings into a second language I also know well? "...you will still need to show it to a professional editor afterwards, or at the very least have it proofread by a few native speakers of the target language (one is never enough)." - Well, you need those when you write in your native language as well, so it's not much of a point. I've just checked some of the translated books I have on my book shelf and they all have a translator, an editor and at least one lector, usually two, so even with a professional translator you'd still need an editor and a lector (or at least a proof reader). Personally I'd rather spend my money on a good editor.
Dec 18	comment	Characters with no names One merit that comes to mind is that without a name, a reader might identify more with the character. In "Characters and Viewpoints", Orson Scott Card says that for one of his books, he completely omitted main character's description. When his editor and publisher called him out on that, he asked them to describe how each of them imagined the character, and they both described themselves. I figure omitting a name would take this approach even further :) So the character could be anybody, could even be the reader.
Dec 17	comment	How Do You Genuinely Improve The Quality of Your Writing? Also, while having a few trusted people to review your work is a good thing, they can become objective fast. They can get too comfortable with your writing style or your characters to notice something a fresh set of eyes would notice. Eventually, you also need to see if your story reaches out to people the way you wanted. Your trusted people might love your protagonist because they know him so well, while nine out of ten people might see him as a douche-bag. And if you didn't want him to be a douche-bag, you have a problem there ;)
Dec 17	comment	How Do You Genuinely Improve The Quality of Your Writing? I agree with some points, but not with the whole answer. This happened to me once - first critic told me I need more descriptions, second one told me my descriptions weren't good and they need to be more tangible, then the third person came and said I have too much description... Needles to say I lost myself while trying to please everybody and ended up writing something that wasn't really me. Still, it was a learning experience. But those very same people pointed out some structural and grammatical flaws that improved my writing ten folds. So it's a matter of learning which critique to take.
Dec 17	comment	How Do You Genuinely Improve The Quality of Your Writing? I think the question here is how to tell a genuine critique from someone's personal pet peeve. For example, I once asked a critique in a chat. The first person said I should use nothing more in a dialogue than "she said, he said". Then the second person came and said that "she said, he said" is boring and superfluous, since it doesn't add anything to the writing and should be shot dead. And then they went into a debate which one of them was right. Some critique will just be based on personal preference, rather than legitimate good writing practice.
Dec 10	comment	combining sentences I think you kind of ruined the point of splitting the sentences when you started the next one with "But". It looks informal and out of place in a piece of technical writing.
Dec 5	comment	Are there any good tablets out there for writing/editing? Just to add, I've done 3 years worth of NaNoWriMo using smartphones, that's 3x50000 words, and a whole lot of other writing as well. Windows Mobile Office is excellent. On PalmOS I used Office2Go, which is still alive I believe, and was also excellent. My current setup is Android + Iota text editor + Dropbox. Android also has some great Office apps, like Kingsoft office which is free, but I've found a simple text editor much less cluttered, and it has all I really need for first draft. I don't know about iPhone apps because, since it lacks a hardware keyboard, it was never interesting to me.
Dec 5	comment	Are there any good tablets out there for writing/editing? I've used full keyboard smartphones for this purpose for the last 7 years or so, and I find them just perfect. True, the screen is a bit small on some models and battery life is nowhere near modern tablets, although if you kill all the wifi/data and turn down brightness it can take you a long while. The advantage of a smartphone is that you don't need an additional device, you would carry your phone with you anyway. Even if you didn't plan to write, you have it with you if the inspiration strikes. In any case, I recommend a physical keyboard (USB if on a tablet) over on-screen touch keyboard.
Nov 30	comment	The “Rules” of Writing #3 is highly debatable, I've seen a lot of pros and cons on the subject. #5 is a bit ridiculous, putting a number on a punctuation mark. You use it when you need to use it, no more and no less. Same goes for ellipses, semicolons, dashes and I don't know what else... If you have too many of either, you're doing it wrong. I like #8,9,10 though :)
Nov 28	comment	Using dashes in writing dialogue They are used in Croatian, too. When I used them in English text, readers were confused. When I used quotes in Croatian text, the editor changed them to dashes. So I guess it all depends who you write for. Personally I prefer quotes, because unlike dashes, you MUST close them even when the dialogue comes at the end. With dashes it's left open and it can be sometimes unclear in longer passages. Also, I'd suggest when using dashes, you separate dialogue from text like in the above example. Otherwise it's extremely confusing to read, not to say irritating. Clarity above all.
Nov 26	comment	What does active voice mean? @kindall: "Laid implies that someone put them there" - isn't that the very definition of passive? That someone else did the action? Would the form be any more active if "There were people lying on the ground"? I don't think a subject in a sentence is required to be capable of moving on its own accord.
Nov 26	comment	What exactly is wrong with 'It was a dark and stormy night'? @Kristina Lopez: Just what I wanted to comment, it's much to "telly". Besides, aren't nights dark by definition, except perhaps in the arctic circle? If it was a moonless night, that would mean something. Also, "stormy"? What does that even mean? Was the storm ongoing in that moment, was it about to storm, or had the storm already passed? The rest of the sentence is a little more "showy", which would be good if he hadn't used every possible way to combine sentences: first the semicolon, then the hyphen, then parentheses...
Nov 23	comment	Effective ways to enrich your active vocabulary? What I can't understand is why is making the majority of your readers stop reading while they look up words in the dictionary considered good writing? Aren't there enough common words to make the writing dynamic without irritating the reader?
Nov 21	comment	Believable (but easy) archaic English Glad I could be of some use :D
Nov 20	comment	Do most novels not get published? May I ask how much effort you spent on marketing?
Nov 20	comment	What makes first person plural a tricky narrative voice? Are you talking about a Narrator that's telling a story in the first-person plural, or actual characters that are a part of the story? There is a difference.
Nov 20	comment	What makes first person plural a tricky narrative voice? I'd have to disagree. Humans are in nature pack animals and there is such a thing as mob mentality. I personally know quite a few regular, "normal" people who, when they go to a football match, succumb to mob mentality and end up demolishing half the town, getting into fights with opposing team's fans and the police (for example). When you ask them why, they can't explain it, and would have never done any of it if they weren't in a group. If the group is cohesive enough and act like a single mind, a reader can easily relate to it.
Nov 20	comment	Believable (but easy) archaic English Read tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YeOldeButcheredeEnglishe before you attempt to write any. It might give you pointers what not to do. It might even dissuade you from the idea all together. (Just a warning: the link leads to tvtropes.org, where you might end up wasting hours, even days of your life ;) )
Nov 20	comment	What does active voice mean? I'm not a native English speaker, and probably not aware of all the grammatical properties of "There was" sentence structure, but shouldn't the passive of "There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground." be "There were a great number of dead leaves laid on the ground."? Dead leaves being the real subject?
Nov 19	comment	What does active voice mean? The sentence emphasizes all the wrong parts of itself by being put in this order. - But what if we don't know who killed Mary? What if we don't care? In that case, passive is exactly what you need. "Someone killed Mary" is now emphasizing the wrong parts. "Mary was killed" is all we need to know. The point is, it's not bad to use passive, you just have to use it appropriately.