case: (Default)
Case ([personal profile] case) wrote in [community profile] fandomsecrets2013-02-17 03:55 pm

[ SECRET POST #2238 ]


⌈ Secret Post #2238 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 097 secrets from Secret Submission Post #320.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

(Anonymous) 2013-02-18 03:24 am (UTC)(link)
Actually, a lot of classics are written in styles that would get you tarred and feathered in fanfiction circles.

Oooh this is actually a thing that drives me bonkers, but perhaps not in the way that you meant. People will be like, "ONLY USE 'SAID' AND 'REPLIED.' OTHER DIALOGUE TAGS ARE RIDICULOUS, GOD." But then you crack open some Dickens and there are ten different dialogue tags to a page. So you're like, "well, Dickens sucks, because look at these things that he did," and the same people respond, "DICKENS IS ONE OF THE BEST WRITERS OF ALL TIME, FUCK YOU."

Anyway. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that what constitutes "good" writing is as dynamic as the language in which one is doing the writing, and I wish that more people would acknowledge that rather than insist on there being hard and fast rules.

(On a related note: I decided to look up why "all of a sudden" is incorrect a number of months ago. Turns out that there's actually no good reason for it. One "explanation" I found even went so far as to note that, one day, "all of a sudden" might be used more commonly than "all of the sudden" and therefore be correct, but for now, it's not correct, simply because it's not the most common usage. WTF?! How can you define a "rule" as "the thing that most people are doing these days?")

(Anonymous) 2013-02-18 05:06 am (UTC)(link)
AYRT

No, that drives me bonkers in pretty much the same way. :-)

(Anonymous) 2013-02-18 03:24 pm (UTC)(link)
DA: It's called prescriptive vs descriptive grammar. Prescriptive stuff is the stuff they teach you in English classes about what the "correct" vs "incorrect" ways to use the language are. Descriptive stuff is frequently "incorrect" according to prescriptive grammars, but because descriptive grammar is simply the way native speakers of a language use that language, it's "correct" in its own right. So if you imagine prescriptive grammars being some stodgy old librarian who won't accept self-published lit into their library because it's not "the most common" form, and descriptive grammars being self-publishing authors (like some books you can get on Amazon) and works by those that write fanfic hosted on places like AO3, maybe it makes more sense? If self-publishing got huge, eventually the stodgy librarian would have to allow that type of lit into the library because it was the most common type of published work, and the older novels from places like Penguin or Random House were considered archaic (or no longer in demand). Even if the stodgy librarian still thinks that a book still doesn't count as "literature" unless it's been workshopped and eventually approved by an objective and very experienced editor.