sherryillk | (no subject)

Is it wrong that I mentally correct the fanfics I read? Sometimes I see little mistakes in the text and since I tend to obsess and have that obsession ruin a story for me, I've lately taken to just mentally correcting the mistakes... It's usually little things like rewording or rearranging a sentence, replacing a word that they misused so I would get a better flow. Is that such a bad thing though? In a way, it makes the story seem better than it should be but in another, I'm still conscious of the fact that there are mistakes and that I have to go to such lengths to enjoy a story.

In the past, I've thought about saving stories on to my harddrive and going in and actually correcting every mistake that I saw before I started reading a story from the beginning with my corrections. And I'll admit it, I've actually done it once but I didn't actually correct the story. Rather, the story had some problematic formatting issues so I went and made it a lot easier to read. After that, I felt immensely guilty because it feels so very wrong to fix someone else's story without their permission, even if it's just a formatting issue.... So I never did it again. But damn, if I don't still have the urges to go to town on some stories....

I guess what I really, really want is for people to just go and get a beta reader already. Not even a great beta reader, just one to catch all the little typos, spelling mistakes, simple grammar problems... Is that really so much to ask? If you invest time in a story, you might as well invest a little more time to make it an awesome story.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

:P Whenever I see a typo or missing word, or like lately, I've been seeing people type the wrong character's name (like the sentence doesn't make sense unless it's a different character), and so I have to re-read it in my head with the correct word.

Authors should be able to edit these things, even without a beta, though I know that even though I self-beta my own stuff, sometimes I'll be re-betaing something months later and still find mistakes here and there. So I understand but... sometimes it seems like the author hasn't re-read her own work.

Yes, exactly! Even though I generally know what the author was trying for when I see an incorrect word used, I just have to fix it and re-read it fixed for me to continue on. I just can't continue without doing that because it would just be wrong.

And god only knows I'm intimately familiar with being blindsided when it comes to your own writing. There are times where I would write LJ entries and I would read it over to make sure I didn't leave words out (happens a lot with me) and I still end up having to go back and edit my posts over and over again. Sometimes you just can't see it when it's your own writing so an extra pair of eyes is always helpful since they don't know how it's supposed to be already and their minds won't mentally add in the words that aren't actually there.