i...i don't know how much more of this i can take!

i've been reading through written responses to my workshop entry. mostly, they have been very helpful. occasionally, someone will attempt to correct something i did intentionally or miss the point of a stylistic choice, but that's okay. it happens.

one reviewer told me i had two run-on sentences. i did not. they were just long. grammatical nitpicking on my part. a run-on is a specific error. length is a stylistic issue.

regardless, i was weathering it okay. the little things were starting to build up. i was asked twice what a newsboy cap was. that saddened me a little. i was told paradisaic was spelled wrong. i could deal with that. it is a bit esoteric. i was told "siphoning off power" was confusing, and that just confused me, but it was mostly the vocabulary stuff that was starting to annoy me. i was told twice that "patron" is a "fan, sponsor, supporter, or client."

what took it past annoyance into weeping, however, is when i realized that they had both used those exact words, which means they looked it up, and the second then provided alternatives, including matron. they will accept matron but not patron? and neither of them could see that, in the role of overseer for a shelter, sponsor is appropriate?

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR VOCABULARY? **sniffsniffsniffle** i want to go back to the days of jane austen, provided that i get to be monied, of course. why isn't okay to believe that the educated, upper class should behave, dress, and talk differently? it isn't that they are better people, they are just privileged, and education is a privilege!

edit: okay, now that i've been corrected on the so called run-ons for a third time, the grammar nazi is raging. STYLE IS DIFFERENT THAN GRAMMAR!!!!

and what is it with people and the in ability to follow pronouns? if you know who the first "they" are, and the paragraph keeps talking about "they," repeatedly, without changing the subject, it's still the same people at the end as it was at the beginning. and if only two people are talking, one boy and one girl, "he" and "she" should be obvious.

i don't know if this is people trying to be microscopically critical in effort to catch everything, make themselves look smart, or for why-ever else, or if they really are that confused. do the classics give them this much trouble? cuz a lot of them are a lot more vague than i ever was.

**takes a deep breath and starts talking to herself**

it's okay. none of this would really bother you if you read them one at a time. it's just reading fifteen in a row. they've given you a *beep* of a lot that you really needed to hear, and we're in this to help each other. this is no reason to storm the english classes of the nation. no, the motivation for that exists, and this is nothing in comparison.

**takes another deep breath**

okay, i think i'm okay now.

so...how crazy am i?

Not very. This is why I like getting feedback through MLC. I find that a lot of the time, people (especially people in literary arts) feel inadequate if they can't find something to complain about, so they make up problems that don't exist. (My favorite being when I got a peer review for an essay that marked negative points as "confusing." What was confusing? Well, he couldn't tell me. I turned in the exact same paper without any changes and the teacher decided to use it as an example paper for well-written literary research papers.)

The run-on thing also bugs me. -_- I think a lot of people don't know what run-ons are, so whenever they see a long compound sentence, instead of saying "it's long" they say "it's a run-on." *eye roll*

Vocabulary...meh. If you have a wide vocabulary, you'll confuse people. And, even worse, if you have a wide vocabulary and no cliffnotes to go along with it, OH NOES. If it's obvious that they don't know the words, just ignore 'em. If the same words keep popping up over and over, check it in the dictionary, and if you're right, ignore 'em.

What I've heard from a couple of published authors that the best thing to do when you get criticism that you dislike (whether you dislike it because it's badly written or because you just don't want to think of things that way) is stomp your feet and gnash your teeth and shout at the paper that it's WRONG AND BAD, and then take a break, think about it a bit, and come back to it later.

I like that idea.

Ahhh..Yeah. If you have a wide vocab, that's pretty awesome, eliana. Though, please don't go back to the jane austain days. Book vocabulary was (I believe? I could be wrong) a tad bit more formal then their usual speech, anyway...There are plenty of modern authors this day with a varied vocabulary (and write colloquially). As for errors....Ah, the good old tokyopop days..where I mispelled every other word and got etique to the point of telling people to shutup...Remember, Cal? It was frustrating...Then I pulled myself together, tried harder at editing, and tried again. That's...half of what you can do. (The trying again part ><)

Though, I was lucky. I got such critque from people who cared about that sort of thing/ who knew what they were talking about >< And sorry about those people , Eliana. Though to look it up, though annoying, shows that they really were willing to try to understand? That or being smartasses..=_= Um...But don't let it get you down...If you must take it one comment at a time, do so. and calmly explain yourself. Hopefully they're smart chaps and catch on. Make them read Cal's tutorials.

feeling better now. by the time i was on the last three, i was talking back to them, the papers.

thanks for the encouragement. and i don't mind getting critiques that i don't agree with. i can ignore them. i'm stubborn enough.

it was just the inability to following basic pronoun use and understand run-ons that really upset me. that...and the half-melancholy half-depression i get when my vocabulary is once again criticized for being too advanced.

anyway, like i said, i finished reading them, taking notes, and i don't have to read them again! so i'm doing better.

I am glad that you are feeling better eliana!

I have not had a peer review of my work yet for school. I may get that in the next quarter with English 215 (I think that is the class). I am doing a report right now for my business class and will be focusing on a research paper after that is complete.

I hate run-on sentences. I will remark on them because they do not make sense. That is different than writing style and compound sentence. I am learning the difference thanks to the MLC and those who review my writing here.

Well, I better check out THE THREAD and then get back to work on my report. APA style, yeah.

Hah! I would have loved to hear these people's responses to Shakespeare. Mispellings galore, made-up words and more run-on sentences than, well, any possible amount. Just point out that it's a stylistic choice and watch them squirm trying to find something else to complain about.

oh, it's okay. now that i'm removed from the situation i can say that most of their advice was excellent.

there were a few people who made me sad by completely missing the point and trying to correct a specific stylist choice (ie: "nothing to prove to everyone"), but mostly, the only problems i had were the grammatical ignorance concerning run-ons, the inability to follow pronouns, and the strange inability to understand that the "patron" is the "sponsor" of the shelter. i mean, come on, "sponsor" was in the definition they found!

anyway, considering what i could have gotten, three minor complaints ain't that bad for peer review from fourteen people. that's a pretty big group.

I think a lot of it is the choice of audience. (Not that I'm studying audience choice in class right now, no, nothing like that! XD )

Modern writing tends towards short sentences. Older works don't. I'm... modern in that sense, 'cause I don't like having the words get in the way of my message , and that usually means shorter sentences. (Well, and I'm also thinking of being a 5th grade teacher in the inner-city, with students who speak Spanish, African American Vernacular English, and asian languages. Yeah, that probably has something to do with it, too.) Longer sentences are for more capable readers, people who can keep a lot of information in their short term memory. Since a lot of people in our country don't even read, asking them to understand a long sentence can be asking a lot.

But, I just read Virginia Woolf, who writes loooooooooots of very long sentences. *keels over* I know a lot of people who love her, but, granted, they are all English or Journalist majors and love to read rather difficult stuff. So, there are people who like long sentences, but they are a smaller audience.

It all depends who your intended audience is. If you want a lot of younger readers who haven't developed their reading skills to comprehend, you need shorter sentences and simple vocabulary. If you want highly developed readers to read your stuff, keep the long sentences and complex vocabulary.

Not nesecarlly, Meab. True, you should definatly keep your audiance in mind, but you shouldn't think in terms of "i need to write lengthy sentences for my complex readers!" My AP Lang. teacher tells us that shorter sentences are used when you want to make a point/ emphasise a certain emotion where as longer sentences are for providing tons of information and details; it's less personal. Books now a days are trying to sell to an audiance, which seems to want more action or sensitivity. They also want to be informed,but in an interesting, "So what does this mean to me/what's so great about it" way. Of course, a lot of books take both and mix 'em all up. But readers don't read for sentence length - they read for context and how well done it's used. But a wider vocab definatly adds to that; it gives you more of a freedom to convey specific thoughts, or describ things more vividly. It gives texture to your story

Eliana, would you be mad if I told you I didn't know one could use the word "patron" in that way?

Thinking about this subject of criticizing something complex for being, well, complex makes me feel a little stupid for some reason. I guess it's 'cause I might be one of those criticizing people. For example, I've read online free-verse poetry that made me go "WTF?" and I dislike when things make me confused. It only gets worse when people pat the writer's butt in reviews and say "Oh, that's brilliant!" Am I missing something that everyone else sees? Or is this poetry just bad and no one else gets that? Or are the reviewers praising the poem because they think it's too complex for their simple minds to grasp, and therefore it's amazing.

OK, so that's my rant. If I go on, I'll only make myself look worse.

But by no means does this mean that you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator when you write something.

...

I think I just contradicted myself.

no, i wouldn't be mad at you. just answer me this, if you read that someone talked to the patron of the shelter and looked up the word to check the usage and found "sponsor" as one of the options, what would your conclusion be?

and on the subject of long sentences, i wouldn't mind them criticizing the length if they told me that it was long and confusing and had too many clauses. it just bugs me that they call it a run-on because it has 45 words (admittedly quite long). it's two different complaints.

and as for the poetry...well, i'm sure some of it is quite bad but people don't want to risk looking stupid by saying so, and some of it is probably pretty decent. e e cummings was ridiculously complicated and notoriously criticized for it, but i actually understand it fairly easily and think it's brilliant. poetry is a bit more complex and more difficult to judge, a little more subjective as well. it really depends on the specific piece and author.

as for writing for the audience, i try to write on my own level but make the context clear enough, if that makes sense.

elianamoran wrote:
no, i wouldn't be mad at you. just answer me this, if you read that someone talked to the patron of the shelter and looked up the word to check the usage and found "sponsor" as one of the options, what would your conclusion be?

Oh, I get what you're saying. "Sponsor" is one of the definitions for "patron", so the usage would be correct. I guess it's just a matter of adding 2 + 2 together.

I hear that loud and clear, Keba. I'm struggling with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. Supposedly a lot of college students like this peom, but... I'm not sure what they got from it.

In the end, whether or not a poem is liked is entirely up to the reader. Some poetry is more generally liked, some poetry only has a small following. I hope you've found some you love!

I think poetry is generally a lot more subjective than prose. I can tell you whether a story is good or not based on very specific criteria, but with poetry, you can break all the rules and nobody gets mad at you. (Except me. CURSE YOU, POETRY, AND YOUR MISUSE OF SEMICOLONS.) I dunno. I have a lot of trouble explaining why I like or dislike poetry, but I'd like to think that I'm pretty good at critiquing prose. So...my point is that you're not the only one getting lost in poetry, Keba. XD

(Oh, and on a random thought, I've found that poets, not the ones on MLC, but ones on other sites, are generally a LOT harder to talk to and more full of themselves than prose writers. And are far less likely to take feedback seriously. >.> Because clearly you don't understand their SHEER BRILLIANCE. Yes, I'm talking about you, guy on writing.com who "almost made it into honors English" so he knew more about grammar than me and then told me he was the best poet in the universe and that my prose sucked. I LAUGH.)

hehehehe almost made it into honors...kinda cute, really, if he didn't make you want to hit im the face with a two-by-four.

yeah, poetry...pretty much, all you have to go on is flow and effect, but effect, of this kind anyway, i subjective, and flow is...well, you can intentionally want the flow to be rough or choppy, so even that...

unless, of course, they establish a rhyme scheme and meter. then you can get them for not following their own self-imposed structure.

i started out in poetry, and i love it, so i find it easier to critique than a lot of people, but cal is right. poets suck at receiving criticism. there are two kinds of poet. the kind that writes from the soul can't really take criticism because they are so close to their work. those that write because they want to be...whatever they think poets are can't take criticism because they think being an "artist" makes them a genius, and i would argue they aren't even artist because they're producing it for the recognition or image they think it will bring rather than to say something.

**sigh**

can you tell i love poetry? you really don't want to get me started on it. trust me. you'll end up with a five page essay that ends in incoherent screaming at all the posers and fakes that give it a bad name, then i'll digress into cursing and complaining about the state of art in general in a post-modern society.