Since no email was submitted with the text, I'm going to make a post on the boards.

This is in no way, shape or form meant to be rude or humiliating, either.

If further parts of this story are submitted, and they are the grammatical nightmare and in the one-CHUNK paragraph form, as Part 1 was, they won't be posted. I spent 30 minutes last night cleaning up Part 1, and I will NOT do this again.

Part 2 is in the tank right now, and it's a royal mess.

Please resubmit a proper copy.

This goes for anyone, by the way.

Thank you.

[,

...

Paolo wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2003 7:11 pm the grammatical nightmare and in the one-CHUNK paragraph form ...

Thank you.[/b] [/B]

If stories are submitted for magazine publication most editors prefer a format where the paragraphs are indented but you do not leave a line between paragraphs.

Personally I prefer unindented paragraphs and a line space between paragraphs. Like this. It seems to work well on this board.

I did once submit a story here in the magazine format but the indent didn't work and it came out as one-chunk. That was ages ago and everything's changed here since then. I think it was something to do with plain text software not recognising a tab symbol.

Perhaps one way to deal with poor grammar and formatting would be to return it to the author, if possible, with a standard, friendly letter of encouragement and ask him to clean up his otherwise brilliant story.

But I can understand anyone getting pissed off.

Kortpeel

There was no email posted with the story, or I would have emailed the author in private.

I keep forgetting that since I now have DSL, it no longer takes me upwards of half an hour to sort through the member lists to find addresses and such.

I must apologize for this oversight on my part.

Stories are a bit hard to read, though, when all dialouge and paragraphs are strewn together with little to no punctuation or spacing.

I am not attempting to discourage the author, or any other. Certainly not.

However, we do have to have some consideration for those who will later READ the story. It really bothers me to read stories on other sites (and I do!) that turn out to be a real mess when I open them, especially when the tags and title and synopses look so promising.

I don't want that for this site, and I'm sure everyone else will understand that.