The Craft Of Storytelling

And I was pointing out that punctuation and grammar should not be considered the be all and end of writing. That the art of storytelling should not be confined by a fixation on the minor points of grammar, and that poetic license can be taken when it comes to grammar.

I have read stories that were clearly written by people to whom English is a second language that were extremely entertaining. If I paused to consider the misuse of words, the improper tenses of the verbs, and the other numerous mistakes I would have missed out on some very good stories. Like the old saw about forest and trees I wouldn't have seen the content because of the presentation. In some cases those people posted only one or two stories, but in other cases they slowly improved their craft and became presentable writers.

I have also exchanged emails and PMs with people who believe that their work isn't "ready" to be seen because it's not perfect. It's odd, but many people are intimidated by grammar and fear being seen using it wrong (perhaps because of a bad teacher in their past). I always tell them to write and post because the only way to improve as a writer is to write - and hopefully gain feedback on your writing.

Goodgulf

I don't think anyone has suggested it is the be all and end all, merely that it's important which I would have thought was self evident.

Linda gives a number of amusing examples, none of which are from the area of grammar, all depend upon punctuation, and I would venture, even so most are clearly (artfully) constructed and don't reflect real life problems, although as I stated earlier punctuation does make prose, especially dense prose, easier to read.

Punctuation seems to have begun as an attempt to capture pauses in oral passages and only later to reflect syntactic relationships. It is interesting that computer discourse, which often minimizes punctuation has spontaneously developed a parallel type of markers, emoticons, which seem to exist to clarify the author's intent in making statements, primarily but not exclusives, humorous vs serious statements.

The second question Februs touches on, what constitutes good writing, deserves a thread of its own or perhaps a website of its own (without checking, I would venture a substantial sum that such sites exist) and I would not want to venture an opinion beyond asserting that I seriously doubt that either punctuation nor conformity to school rules of grammar play an important role in its definition.

Oh, one last point, while it may be arguable that the Beowulf poet dealt with simple themes and thus did not need punctuation nor school grammar, it would be difficult to make the same claim of Chaucer who also seems to have existed in mostly happy ignorance of punctuation.

Februs, you are educated in the English language so you understand proper grammar and punctuation. Consider the person who hasn't been exposed to this training. I make an honest effort to comply with the rules required to have my stories posted to this forum. I read and re-read and re-read again my stories. I change my punctuation over and over until I'm confused as to what is right and what is wrong. Finally I submit a 1000 word story that took much longer to proof read then it did to write and I'm told it's not in the correct format. Try as I may I still don't have a clue to what a correct format is. People like yourself don't understand that I don't understand what you want me to do. Your examples don't make sense to me, but I try to follow the examples and I get lost in the re-formating of my story. I don't think I have a learning disability for grammar and punctuation but I must because I sure can't learn to get my stories right for you to publish them. I have more parts of my story series already written but I don't want to keep asking others to correct them for me and they get no credit for their work. I am hoping that I can find a spanking story forum that will publish my work without being so critical of it's proper punctuation. I don't expect you to lower your standards to accommodate my stories. However I do believe that if you published them the way I send them to you, they would be read and enjoyed non the less and the punctuation wouldn't stop people from reading them.

I had no intention of stirring up a hornets' nest here. I merely came across those examples and found them amusing examples of how punctuation can change meaning. Nor am I suggesting that only English teachers should write stories!

On the question of style, yes, one could argue over whether a full stop or a semi colon should be used in a particular case, or whether to use brackets or dashes. Some punctuation rules, however, are accepted all over the English speaking world, and have nothing to do with style. "The dog ate it's dinner," is not a stylistic choice by an author; it is simply wrong.

And on that note, I shall bow out of this thread!

Yes it is wrong as it actually reads "The dog ate it is dinner," which makes no sense what so ever!

spankdaddy
Loads of us offered to help you understand the basic rules. If you put as much effort into accepting help as you do repeating the fact that you can't do it, you would have had it sussed weeks ago!! If you wish to submit your latest parts of your story, e-mail them to me at itspinkangel@yahoo.co.uk and I will edit them and submit them for you.



Like Linda I see no point in this thread becoming a slanging match. I have to work damn hard to make my stories correct and to correct other's work as I have certain problems due to a form of dyslexia but I do so because I think they deserve to be done right! I make mistakes the same as everyone but I do try and learn from them...

Goodgulf: "In my mind, the important thing to remember about grammar the number of English teachers on the bestseller lists. Usually that number is zero."
Indeed! As they say, 'those who can, do; those who can't, teach'. I'm an English teacher and it took me 25 years to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) in a creative way. But your point is not entirely true: I suspect there are more best-selling ex-English teachers than you might think. Wasn't Louis de Bernieres one? It's also a slightly unfair comparison, given the tiny proportion who make the best-seller lists. Do we expect Biology teachers to discover new DNA codes (such as a spanking gene for example), or History teachers to unearth new evidence about the itinerant flagellant groups of the Middle Ages? No - they're busy educating the young, following their vocation.

But I do understand the frustration and hurt being expressed in this thread about language and our varying degrees of confidence with it - whether it be about grammar or punctuation (which are entirely different things) ...


Not odd at all, just a great shame. Millions of people (regional dialect speakers) in the UK have been led to believe by their teachers that they don't speak their own language properly! What?? I suspect Americans too sometimes feel this snobbery about language coming from the English. These attitudes are pervasive, I'm afraid.

Standard English (SE) was and is one among many dialects (that of the London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle 100's of years ago), but it became established as the 'prestige' dialect because it was the one spoken by the powerful and educated - if you wanted to make it in life, speak like them. SE is now commonly referred to as 'correct' or 'proper' English when it isn't - it's simply the dialect established as 'standard'.

To tell anyone that the language they speak is 'incorrect' or 'not proper' is hurtful and damagingly disempowering - they got it from their parents, for heaven's sake, and try telling a child their parents are fundamentally wrong in this way! They won't believe you and they'll reject whatever it is they think you're selling. Language is an emotive issue because it is so central to each individual's mental life, psyche and culture.

However, I do believe this library is not being unreasonable or unfair in expecting a certain level of accuracy in spelling, punctuation and grammar in submissions; and I think we should applaud the aspiration towards high standards in the presentation of texts, so that the reader's experience is as smooth and easy as possible. The best-selling American Jonathan Franzen just had 80,000 hard back copies of his latest novel pulped because the typesetters printed an earlier draft with many errors in it. His pride precluded giving his readers anything less than the best. This library is free, but that doesn't mean it has to have lower standards. The 'reddies' and the volunteer validaters give generously of their time to ensure texts are accurate and properly readable: authors should at least do their part in submitting reasonably accurate texts.

Any of the existing sites or forums that are spanking-related will let you post whatever you want (subject to not breaking their rules of course). This site however, although having a small forum for discussion, is not a forum site, we are a library and whether people agree with it or not, all four of us who administer it, believe both punctuation and grammar to be important and I make no apology for that, quite the opposite in fact. Not the be all and end all as it might have been implied, simply important. On top of which we also believe presentation to be important, both in terms of the way the site looks and in terms of how we present stories for viewing. Of course, not everyone will agree with our approach and everyone is entitled to their own opinion on the matter but as far as this particular site goes that's what we want to focus on and how we intend to do things.

What I can't understand, however, is why you keep bringing the same subject up time and time again. This whole thread has now been taking over by it and was not the subject which the OP was wishing to discuss. We took the time to correct the first parts of the serial you submitted but then asked you politely to tidy up subsequent parts as correcting your submissions was taking up a significant amount of time. At this point you posted that you had no interest whatsoever in learning how to punctuate or use correct grammar, although all we were asking for was some very basic requirements to be met such as putting quotation marks around speech. Various people have offered to help you and I believe Lori has corrected your most recent submissions and is happy to do so in future so I'm not sure what more you want?

PinkAngel
Put as much effort???? Please PinkAngel, don't even suggest that I haven't tried to learn this. I have tried and tried to understand what you and others refer to as basic punctuation and formatting. I don't get it. You are expecting me to learn a skill that is totally foreign to me.  I never had any of that parts of a sentence stuff or when to use commas and quotes in school. I agree that others have offered to help me with getting my stories published. I felt that they should get credit for doing that and I was told that they couldn't be added as co-authors. That I feel is just the management being difficult to work with. What does it hurt to include another person who most likely spent more time fixing my writing than I did writing it as a co-author? I believe people deserve to get credit for what they do. Maybe there should be a place to put below the author's name a title like edited by So and So. I didn't mean to hijack this thread and make it into something different.  I felt my point of view fitted the topic.
If someone would please give me the URL of a forum that will accept my stories the way they are written, I will submit them there and ask that my stories be removed from here along with my author title.  I enjoy the writing, I never thought it would be this difficult.  Once my first story got published I guess I got bitten by the writing bug.  Story ideas keep popping into my head and I keep writing.  I have the time to write but I don't have the intelligence to write in the correct format.  God knows I have tried.  Februs asked me what do I want?  All I ask is that you give the people who are willing to help me get my stories published credit for their editing skills. 

You can do this yourself simply by posting a thank-you message to the forum.



'Author' on this site refers to the person who wrote the story, not the person who corrected faulty grammar and punctuation in it. As to your accusation of us being difficult to work with I think you need to take a look at yourself, we've gone out of our way to help you and you've done nothing beside constantly complain and hijack forum threads. We must have expended hours on end either correcting your original submissions, engaging in dialogue with you or endlessly responding to your objections on a variety of forum threads.

As I explained earlier ANY spanking forum will take your writing as it stands .. try using Google to search for some.