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Writing Pet Peeves

9 years ago

Something that really annoys me in writing is when someone ends a character's dialogue with a period and treats 'he said' or 'he says' as a separate sentence. It disregards every manual of style ever made and generally just feels offensive to the writers who work their ass off to get their writing correct.

"I'm tired of this." He said.
Wrong.

"I'm tired of this," he said.
RIGHT!

So I guess what I'm asking is, what's your writing pet peeve? You know, those little things that annoy the hell out of you JUUUST enough to detract from the flow of a good story.

Writing Pet Peeves

9 years ago

Oh wow, you actually decided to capitalize your post this time! :O

Writing Pet Peeves

9 years ago

Fuck that. The guy's thought ends there! I'm never going to get that right, narration and dialogue are separate entities. Which brings me to my post, actuallly!

 Something that irks me is when, in rhyming poetry, a rhyme is completed in narration but not in the dialogue that started it, when other characters CLEARLY rhyme all the time.

So, we've established that the story universe is in verse, other characters are rhyming regularly, but then something like Example Mcgee comes along:

"John, we need to stop this game of charades.

Everyone in here knows you have AIDS!"

"I didn't know it was AIDS she had!"

But for that info, John should've asked his dad.

So the half of the couplet that rhymes doesn't fucking exist in the actual story universe. This person doesn't rhyme, he just leaves everyone hangning, and the other characters don't think it's awkward that he isn't rhyming, even though rhyming is the clearly established normal way to fucking speak. What the hell!? It works the other way around too, something is said in narration, and a character will say something that rhymes with the narrated bit and fucking nothing else, and none of the rhyming community around them questions it. Why are any of these fuckers going to rhyme in the first place if some asshole can just pretend they heard a magic invisible voice say something that justified their sentence!?

Writing Pet Peeves

9 years ago

Let me explain why you're not supposed to end dialogue with a period if there's a tag at the end of the sentence.

Treat dialogue and its respective tag narration as two different paragraphs and you'll pretty much see. Example:

"Hi."

He said.

See, it doesn't make sense. With a period, the 'He' refers to no one in specific and is confusing. It follows a similar system to He and I versus Me and Him. "Me and Him buy milk," turns into "Me buy milk" if you remove the Him, while He and I becomes "I buy milk".

Proper context and correlation are both important foundational pieces in the english language.

Writing Pet Peeves

9 years ago
people who

*thinks about what to say next*

d-d-do this crap...

Writing Pet Peeves

9 years ago

You like strawberry pudding, so your opinion is invalid.

because it's awful.