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I have been in recent correspondence with another writer who wanted to know why I don't allow public comments on my stories. I said that one negative comment had far more affect on me than 20 positive ones, and I felt I didn't have to take criticism if I didn't want it.
Nowadays, I have the courage to publish stories with public comments disabled. (And there's certainly plenty of moral bullying to imply there's something wrong with you if you don't allow public comments.)
Of course, after such correspondence, one's mind continues to churn, and I recalled the worst criticisms I had ever received in the days prior to that, either here on BC, or perhaps on Fictionmania where I used to write. I occasionally got a comment such as, "Full of bad spelling. Get an editor."
To a person who believes good English is the very essence of any kind of writing, whether it's fantastic literature or trash (and I tend to write the latter!), this is the most offensive insult anyone could ever make. That criticism was permanently written at the bottom of my story.
Had those people sent the message by PM, I would probably have given a more frank answer than the ones I actually did. Perhaps I should have said something like:
"If you'd studied a little of your own history, you wouldn't make such moronic judgements about other people's work. For, starting in the 1780s, Noah Webster produced a series of spelling books, and eventually a dictionary, in which he changed the spelling of hundreds of words. As a result, tens of thousands, and ultimately, hundreds of millions of Americans grew up learning to spell words differently from that specified in the English Dictionary. That spelling is now embodied in your American language."
To quote from Wikipedia,
Slowly, edition by edition, Webster changed the spelling of words, making them "Americanized". He chose s over c in words like defense, he changed the re to er in words like center, and he dropped one of the Ls in traveler. At first he kept the u in words like colour or favour but dropped it in later editions.
One can understand the logic of many of his changes, but he was also doing it for political reasons. In the years following the American War of Independence, he was showing that the English no longer owned the English dictionary.
The problem is that this has meant that Britain and America would forever (or at least, in our foreseeable future) have different spellings of many common words.
Will they ever converge? In my view, it's extremely unlikely. After all, would the Americans really want to start spelling words the English way? (You can swap the nationalities to get an identical response.)
So, Noah, you may have had some good ideas, but you sure have resulted in a lot of problems.
Comments
spelling
i do agree with you. As a Canuck there is this thing called a border that separates to countries and here we still spell the correct way but these dam computers don't .....oh yeah made in USA (just joking ). i do see that most that read my scribbles don't leave any comments at all. Don't take it to heart. write what you want the way you want and screw the comments
Backwards?
Well it seems that the latest "Websters" now include the British versions but list them as "British Variants". "Just a bit backwards", don't you think?
I think in the long run the web will have an impact on as people are more exposed to non-local text sources. I have seen the word forms "colour" and "color" often enough to consider both correct in spite of what my older hard copy dictionary says. And I have read quite a lot by British authors over the years so both sets of spellings seem normal to me.
My personal guess on the matter is....
The rest world will come to recognize the American(US) versions as that oddball American(US) variants. While The US will go on its merry way stubbornly acknowledging the British variants as quirky British spelling.
lol,
~Hypatia >i< ..:::
PS. As far as my spelling is concerned I can't type for _____(bleep)!
And I also add few quirky things on purpose sometimes.
Spelling and punctuation wise that is!
PPS. As far as comments are concerned please keep in mind that nothing will ever please everyone, try not to take it to heart.
"British variants"
Love it - but I guess he who writes the dictionary chooses the spelling and the variants. Oh well, at least we understand each other to some degree.
Trust me when I say this
Most of the comments ore from people who don't even write stories and the ones who complainthe most are the ones who think they're much smarter than anyone else reading your story. You can write the most beautiful story and still have a, HAH, look at me, I found a spelling error, but I never see, I'd like to edit your work to help you with somethimg you might have missed, Arecee
Have made the offer
I'm a compulsive editor. I don't mind a few typos (that, I believe, accounts for most spelling errors) or verb tense errors, (I don't count British spelling as errors,) but when the manuscript is littered with these, I go into edit mode. I can do this because of an old dial-up internet habit. I use keyboard short cuts to cut and paste anything over a page long into my word processor before reading it.
If the author clearly is in need of an editor, I often PM them with an offer to read and edit the stories for them before they post. On the few occasions that I've been taken up on the offer, I use the method of simply documenting the error location with my proposed fix. The author is then free to implement what I've suggested or ignore it.
I've found that a lot of people who post stories that are in need of editing are in too much of a hurry and if I don't get back to them by the next day, they tend to post it as is. Too bad, but they should realize that real life gets in the way.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
I'll occasionally pm an author when I see an error
that bothers me. Hope the authors here aren't offended when I do that. I try hard to be nice about noting a spelling error or a wrong word. The wrong word errors are so common now with spell checkers auto correcting as you type.
Typically I just skip them if they don't disturb the flow.
Correcting not wanted.
At least you got bad comments.
Several of my stories have been written using language and sentence structure that is common in Middle Eastern cultures. For a time, someone was "editing" them so that they conformed to American norms. It hurt me and pissed me off. To me their corrections tore the heart and soul out of the story.
I don't give a damn about "American Norms" full stop! I don't actually know if I will publish again. If I do, my story will contain an admonishment to not fix anything.
I have a small following as I do not write to the "model", rather trying to educate, inform and amuse.
I knew that was as a
I knew that was as a "feature" on Fictionmania, and something which pissed me off too, since my English was sometimes translated into American.
But I always believed there were no such "improvements" made to stories on BC.
Whichever site it's on, I feel it is unbelievably rude to make alterations without telling the author what they are doing and giving the author opportunity to comment
Even more so in some cases.
Especially if it its dialog. Assuming that all characters speak in proper American English is actually rather stupid, particularly if it is not an American character in an American setting. And it is still a stupid assumption even for an American one in an American setting.
The same goes for applying any other such standard to dialog, it is not whether the form is proper but if it is appropriate to the character. Fixing that is actually breaking the story, at least a little bit.
I felt that way.
I must actually say that BCTS people as a whole have been uncommonly kind and loving to me. Those who "fixed" my work shall remain unnamed. I hope speaking out now will give them some sense about how much I dislike being made to conform to American standards.
The thing that is odd about all this is I am American. :) But, having traveled a bit, to Honduras, Kenya, Israel, Japan and Thailand, Ohio, and Canada. I get a sense of how different the rest of the world is compared to America, and how single mindedly Americans are "American", and having been Isolated on both sides by great huge ponds for centuries, I can see how the American ignorance can have accumulated. Even Canadians bridle at the way Americans seem to assume they are our "Little Brothers". :(
So, I've had it out now, and feel much better thank you. I do hope that I can have some time to write again soon, inshallah. :)
Gwendolyn
Ah Fictionmaina, I remember it well
I started posting on FM in 2004 (or thereabouts) after first posting on Crystals. My first stories were frankly crap. I know I have improved since then.
I got a lot of comments on both sites. Some were from people who refused to accept that my British dialogue and spellings were valid and that only pure US English would be good enough. It wasn't the comments that actually drove me away from those sites. That was the endless stream of 'teenage boy tries on a dress and suddenly becomes the prom queen' stories. Some of us who tried to put a degree of sophistication into the story was often met with a deluge of almost hate mail. I stopped posting in 2005. It took me a long time to even consider posting anywhere again.
In general, the comments I have received here have been supportive (with one exception who virtually insisted that I use them as an editor).
Thankfully we have the Kudos system so that people who like your story can say so easily. My only regret of this system is that none of my stories has yet to break the magic 100 points barrier.
What's in a number?
Sure, we all want to see the high numbers, but I expect some writers think 100 Kudos is a pretty miserable rating. (Damn them!)
I have always felt that even if just one unhappy person reads my story and giggles, then the story has achieved its objective.
I was being a little
I was being a little sarcastic... :)
I'm like you in that if one persons appreciates what I post then it is all worth it.
I post here simply because I want to share my stories/ramblings/rants (both good and bad) with others of a like mind.
Vive La Difference
As usual, Bill Bryson offers up a huge helping of common sense regarding the possible divergence of British and US English.
In the late 1940s, the Daily Mail ran an article discussing American expressions that would be 'positively incomprehensible' to the average English person. These included commuter, seafood, rare as applied to meat, mean in the sense of nasty, dumb in the sense of stupid, intern, dirt road and living room...the suggestion that English will evolve into separate branches...seems to ignore the very obvious consideration that communications have advanced a trifle...
The conclusion Bryson reaches isn't an uplifting one.
If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should be not that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.
Mother Tongue, Penguin edition (1991) pages 243 - 244.
As you should know ...
... I'm one of your biggest fans but I'm also a bit anal retentive over grammar and spelling (not too much because I've been known to make mistakes myself). I haven't noticed many glaring errors in your stories and if had I noticed something that you may have missed because proofing your own stuff is fraught with difficulties, it would have been reported (politely) by IM.
I've only been published properly once when I wrote a review on some CAD software for a magazine. Not only did they fail to put my name to the article they changed some of my English grammar wrongly! I don't think the editor knew what a gerund is nor that 'data' is a plural for 'datum' :) My only payment was to keep the software for my own use.
I feel a bit guilty that I haven't IM'd you about your latest oeuvre but be assured one of those kudos is mine :)
I'm currently editing a massive story written by a Canadian and I leave most of the spelling alone but I've noticed it seems to be in a half-way house between colonial and UK English.
Robi
Mixing British and American
In my story The Redhead and the PM I deliberately mixed spelling as the main character became more and more involved in British life.
Portia
Language versus dialect
Unless you choose to do as the French (notably a group of which my own personal experience has been less than pleasant), any language will always be a living thing comprised of multiple dialects. We speak of UK versus American English - yet both countries have many, many dialects of that same language.
Here in the United States, I am one of those unique people who traveled and lived in numerous regions within the country during my formative years. Because of that fact, I don't really have a recognizable accent or dialect. Most of my family being in the southeast region of the country, I am routinely ridiculed by them for having an accent - for being a Yankee if you will. Yet, my friends and family who live in the northeast region find humor in listening to me speak as well due to my different speech patterns.
In all honesty, I have a bastardized accent and speak a conglomeration of several dialects of American English - a mixture of Southern Califrnia, southeastern drawl, northeastern/mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern. I have the less than desirable ability to begin conforming to whatever area I am in given enough uninterrupted time there. My sons and my ex-wife always enjoyed making fun of me for picking up a nice southern accent whenever we spent any amount of time in the Carolinas or Florida visiting family. Of course, they have always enjoyed making fun of the way I say certain words anyway. Is it my fault they don't know how to pronounce pecan, or praline, or pajamas? And let's not even begin to talk about how they react whenever I go back home to Los Angeles.
The point behind this rant is that just how intelligent you are, just how well you speak, and just how much people will make fun of your speech patterns is entirely based on what part of the world you find yourself in at any given time.
Language is a living breathing thing. Every year we create new words, or alter the meaning of existing words. After all, your expert in the 40's had no idea what a TV was, let alone a byte or the meaning of broadband. And just what does PC mean? Depending on context, we're discussing a computer , or talking about an overly polite form of speech. Life, like time, marches on. Change is one of the only absolutes in our universe.
Of course unless your French - then you pass a law making it illegal to alter or add to the language. Of course, these are the same people who still think that they are sitting at the center of the universe.......
Talk about sticking your head in the sand!
Dallas
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
It's No' Aboot The Spelling
Now that's proper English! As she is spoke!
It may be me that Charlotte's referring to with me querying why she turned off the "comments" facility. Let me declare that I love her stories and she brings an all-too-rare touch of humour and a little spicy ribaldry to BCTS, and I have personally never noticed any deficiencies in her spelling or grammar.
I am sure there are occasional typos but my attention to the tale is never diverted by any that may be there. In fact she is definitely one of the more literate authors on this site. I try very hard in my own postings to proof-read what I have written, but it is a fact that if you miss something on the first pass then your eye is likely to glide over the error in subsequent readings.
It is sad that minor discrepancies attract savage criticism and cause an author to disable what I consider to be a valuable function of the site's architecture and even sadder that there should be argument about national differences in spelling. One of the beauties of this site is that it gives access to us peculiar creatures on a global basis. Vive la difference (except for the French),
G'day
Joanne
Clarification
The reason my spelling was criticised was because the people who made the comments were not aware that English English has different spellings to American English, and no, Joanne, it was not your simple query I was referring to.
England and America
England and America, two countries separated by a common language. We won't even mention the Australians.
Well i'm not so sure he did
Well i'm not so sure he did it just to thumb his nose at the British. Seems more like he got rid of unnecessary letters, and rearranged things to make more sense (to the American tongue). For instance 'center' say the word, listen to it.. and tell me how in the world it was originally spelled centre... or just where the U sound in 'Colour'
*shrugs* of course I'm American and don't speak with a British accent either, which i'm willing to bet has something to do with our changing languages as well. To say 'Colour' gives it a weird.... almost French sounding accent. (by the way i looked it up and it's COULEUR in French, so yeah, the U totally makes it French not English)
Honestly though i think the British/American English versions are going to steadily divide even more, not come together as time progresses. It's only been a little over 200 years and look at how much they've changed already. How much more different you think it will be given another 200? Only thing that *might* keep it from progressing further would be our contact via the internet, now days interacting with our cousins across the pond has become much more frequent than it used to be.
Another thing to take into consideration is how our language is being affected by other cultures. America is a melting pot of different ethnicities.
You can't ignore the politics
There's no doubt in my mind that most of the changes made sense. No, we British do not pronounce the word as cen-tre. As for the u in words like harbour, it's quite clear from the Wikipedia article that Webster himself had changing views about this, initially keeping it in and then later removing it.
I think there is also no doubt that Webster's spelling books helped to make 19th c American children more literate than their British counterparts, and I'm sure the simplified spelling also helped.
But you cannot make changes like this without ignoring the political element, and I'm not just talking about national politics - there are also the politics of the academic institutions such as Oxford University who decree the way that words are spelt. Webster published his first speller in 1783, the year the American War of Independence ended. Was that pure coincidence? I think it would be unrealistic to believe there was no element of cocking a hoop at the British and their ancient academic establishments.
I don't see any element of further division. I'm no expert on the development of American English, but it seems to me that the differences we see today are still limited to those introduced by Noah Webster during his lifetime. As new words are invented, mainly to cope with evolving technology, so they are transported across the world.
Speling Errors
Unsolicited "corrected" stories may be well-intended, but can still blow-up in your face. You are dealing with regional variations/dialects, American/Canadian/United Kingdom/Australia/etc. as well as the author's sensitivity/intent/etc.
I did a lot of proofreading for PB for his Drew/Gaby fanfic, I had to consider the four language variations at play. PB's Canadian English, my southwestern American English, Gaby & co.'s UK English and the American Host's southeast American English. As well, we had to make changes visible to each other. I was using Word2003 at the time, and I set it up to track changes. I could leave notes for him about certain highlighted sections and he could do the same. This would also track editorial alterations and corrections. PB had final say-so on any changes to the final cut, some of mine he accepted, some resulted in questions back and forth. I yielded to him on all things UK English, his Canadian English was closer than my American English. I was certainly not an authority on southeastern (Appalachian) American dialects, so very little was used, just enough to give the flavor. U.K. spellings and conventions were used when the British exchange students were speaking; American spellings and conventions were used for the American students, hosts, and such.
One disagreement sticks in my mind: where the U.K. and Canada use the "t" word ending and the U.S. uses "ed". Examples: leapt/leaped, knelt/kneeled, and so on. I altered "leapt" to leaped when an American was speaking. PB wanted to use leapt as that was the common Canadian/UK use. I countered that as it was an American speaking "leaped" was the word he'd use. Other than that it was understood by me that dialog and emails were verboten. Other than minor spelling changes for common, single spelling words, the exchanges, particularly in emails, were not to be touched. He pointed out that texting, emails and such were usually sloppy and to make them word perfect with all the proper grammatical rules followed would be unnatural when read. He's right, and I didn't argue that point at all.
So, having an author who's preferences you know and who is agreeable, as well as having an idea how far the author is willing to let you go are at least the minimum a person needs to know before proofreading, copy-editing, and/or outright (slash-n-burn) editing a story. So unsolicited alterations, well-meaning or not, should not be submitted to the author. This prevents the loss of fingers, hands, heads or other portions of the anatomy you might have a fondness for.
I hope this makes sense!
Karen
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
New dimension
I think your post introduces a new dimension to my original. If I read you correctly, you have one author but were publishing the books in several different English-speaking countries and wanted to "translate" the text for each of those countries. That really sounds a formidable task.
A translator would claim that you are breaking one of the basic rules of translation - that you should only translate into your own native text. (A rule which was rarely followed by manufacturers in the Far East, which explains why we could never understand their assembly instructions.)
Personally, I feel the language used should be consistent throughout the story. Making subtle changes is more likely to get some smart arse claiming you have made a mistake than to be a helpful feature. I don't have a problem with a character using words they would use if they were for real, eg, if a French or German was speaking English, then putting verbs, subject and object into an unusual order would be fine. But you didn't say what you did to the spellings of the words such as harbour, used by speakers.
In my most recent story, Unconsummated Love, which included two Americans living in Britain, I did briefly toy with American spelling and immediately rejected it. My story was being written by a British author so the language should be in UK English.
Finally, I think the issues identified earlier about consulting with an author before making changes were when the author had not consented for anyone to make changes to their text.
Best wishes
Charlotte
The trouble with simplified spelling ...
... which tries to spell words how they are said is deciding whose pronunciation to use.
My accent will be quite close to the accent in Warsop (aka Gabyland)though that's in North Notts and I originate in South Notts close to the Derbyshire border. Our accent is totally different from so-called RP (received pronunciation) which is used by the aristocracy and those who try to emulate them ie 'posh' :) There are many variation in England even before we include the rest of the UK, let alone the wider English speaking world. So an attempt is doomed to failure. Best leave it as it is :)
Robi
Nope, not at all
The situation was one author, Canadian, a proofreader/editor, American (Okla/Texas dialect). The story was about a group of students from the UK (as somebody noted, the Warsop district) spending 6 weeks in Virginia. Now, that area has an accent noticeably different from the UK, and even very different from my Okla/Texas accent. Neither PB nor I were familiar with that regional usage so we just threw in things like "I gotta go" rather than "I have got to go." But it just wasn't enough to say these characters were in Virginia in the U.S., the grammar and phrasing had to be American English.
Now, personally, a story written with Americans in the U.S. using UK grammar and language quickly yanks me right out of the story. There are several stories on here that are otherwise good stories that I can't stay involved in because the American characters are speaking in UK English. UK English grammar and phrasing used by somebody born and raised in Oklahoma doesn't work, it's a big speedbump in the story. I might be standing in the corner of the room, I might have stood in the corner for awhile, but never I was stood in the corner. I might go to the hospital or I might be in the hospital, but I was not in hospital.
So, PB and I had to make the Americans sound like, well . . . Americans. This story would be read by people with different accents and dialects, in the U.S., the UK, Canada, and other countries and the characters needed to sound like natives of whatever place they came from. PB could handle the UK English easily enough; and we collaborated on the American English. PB wrote the story and I gave it a look over several times to make the Virgina locals sound like locals, not like transplanted UK citizens.
Let me make this clear: I made some changes in word choices and phrasing but I never overwrote what PB had already written. Using the Track Changes feature he could see my recommendations and questions. After everything was to his satisfaction he then merged the changes into the original document. I heartily recommend using this or similar methods when proofreading/editing someone else's work. Accept what you want, reject what you don't want, then painlessly merge it into one prepared document.
But my main point is that PB knew what he wanted and he communicated that to me before I ever started. He then was able to see what changes I was making and why, and could accept or reject whatever he, as the author, wanted. Taking somebody else's story and "correcting" it without the author's knowledge is wrong. On person on here with administrative privileges* dropped me a note telling me she had cleaned up one of my stories and fixed some spelling errors, placing these in my story without my prior consent. I fortunately keep in my records a duplicate of what I posted so I overwrote the "corrected and fixed up" posted version with what I had originally posted. I can get stubborn like that.
But my point is that all this was done with the prior approval of the author. If an author's posting is so riddled with errors that it is unreadable to you, then drop the writer/author a PM. Do not attempt to fix anything yourself. Posting a comment listing all the alleged spelling or grammar errors. It's rude, offensive and will no doubt be quickly deleted. In short, unsolicited alterations are not welcome by most authors, just don't do it!
*This was not any of the current admins, the person who did this is no longer here.
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
I absolutely agree about the
I absolutely agree about the author's right not to have their story amended without permission - indeed their copyright is law. The reason I permanently moved to BC following one of Fictionmania's crashes was that it was part of their site philosophy at that time (and maybe still is) that rather than loading the story yourself, you had to pass it to a team of volunteers who would vet and "improve" it. Strangely enough, the quality of the English in their stories at that time (maybe it's improved, now) was far, far worse there than it was here. However, it didn't stop the volunteers messing about with my story, which I hated.
I note your dislike when a Brit writes a story about Americans, set in America and uses British spelling. Personally, I think that kind of story is pretty courageous (or do I mean foolhardy?) anyway. However, I still believe that if an author is going to do that, they need to consider their audience.
A lot of your points have been about word use rather than the spelling, and I am absolutely in agreement over that. To make their characters sound authentic is one of the skills any author should possess, and it's done by the use of words.
Spelling and word use
Those are to sides of the same coin. They all affect how a story "reads". In spite of, or perhaps because of my having lived in Europe and traveling extensively, I would never be so foolhardy as to attempt to write about UK residents in the UK. Anybody that tries such a cross-cultural experiment needs to have a native to check their work. Such a problematic situation can so easily damage an otherwise outstanding story, and it is so easily preventable. I have stopped reading several stories because of this. The fact that I "hear" a UK speaker when I read UK English might be part of the problem.
Imagine if you will a story set in the UK with all UK residents. Your character gets up to leave a restaurant and the waitress shouts to you from across the room "Y'all have a blessed day!" and your character replies "You do the same, hon! Be cheerful! Bzzzt! Wrong country! That's the exact exchange I had in a restaurant about 2 hours ago. Liz (the waitress) says that to all her customers. That's my point.
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
I have heard, . ..
Just a bit of UK grammar and phrasing in common US speech post Harry Potter.
*grins*
~Hypatia >i< ..:::
Rowlins' POS
That won't last. Eventually something new will take it's place. 40 years from now it will be Harry Who? And not a moment too soon.
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
Yes But,
The Harry Potter Rule 34 off shoots will last forever. :p
Lol,
~Hypatia >i< ..:::
.
PS.(an after thought) Unless the censors actually manage to eliminate all that stuff from the web. I worry about what else they might decide to eliminate too.
English Purity
I think this somewhat tongue-in-cheek comment says it all:
Here is the history of the English language in its purest and simplest form.....
English is the result of Norman men at arms trying to make dates with Anglo-Saxon barmaids.
(author unknown)
So, like the offspring of such "dates", English started out as a bastardization! ;-)
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
If they pay me for the story ...
If they pay me for the story, then I would likely write it the way they want it. :)
G
The English language
The English language has been ambushing and mugging foriegn languages for their words for its entire existance.