heavensqueen: (Default)
heavensqueen ([personal profile] heavensqueen) wrote in [community profile] yuletide_coal2015-12-27 01:37 pm
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Coalclaw Adventures

Keep the yulewank spirit alive
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Re: Bad fics

(Anonymous) 2015-12-27 08:16 pm (UTC)(link)
http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2015/works/5466008

The beta really failed at their job. Ouch.

Re: Bad fics

(Anonymous) 2015-12-27 08:42 pm (UTC)(link)
Author clearly not a native English speaker. Hard to beta those fics because there comes a point where the only thing you could do would be re-write the whole thing into more correct English.

Unless YT is about to start instituting a TOEFL requirement for participants, this seems like a tough one.

Re: Bad fics

(Anonymous) 2015-12-30 03:44 am (UTC)(link)
ESL teacher about to comment and you beat me to the snarky comment. A+++, anon.

Re: Bad fics

(Anonymous) 2015-12-30 07:55 am (UTC)(link)
DA

I've done rewrite betas. Sometimes, it makes sense. One time an esl author I was betaing for was trying for a very distinctive ye olde style in English, and she was including rhyming couplets and the whole thing was a translation of another version of the fic. I betaed the prose parts, but the poetry I just rewrote. It was the only practical solution.

But that's impractical for most YT fic. I figure the worst esl issues fall into that same abyss of badfic caused by talentless native speakers and people who are totally phoning it in this year. YT has never had quality controls after all.

Re: Bad fics

(Anonymous) 2015-12-27 08:50 pm (UTC)(link)
Or the author ignored (or ran out of time to make) all the beta's corrections. Or the author refused to believe that dialogue sentences followed by a dialogue tag should end in a comma and not a period in English. Or the beta was able to fix some glaring ESL errors but not the deeper problem of the author's writing just not flowing well.

Re: Bad fics

(Anonymous) 2015-12-27 11:11 pm (UTC)(link)
"Or the author refused to believe that dialogue sentences followed by a dialogue tag should end in a comma and not a period in English."

^^This. I betaed an otherwise-good fic full of that. I haven't checked, but I hope the author took those changes to heart.

Re: Bad fics

(Anonymous) 2015-12-28 06:55 am (UTC)(link)
It looks like they had a beta (named in author notes), but the beta is also ESL.

Re: Bad fics

(Anonymous) 2015-12-28 07:03 am (UTC)(link)
Ouch, that seems like a misstep.

Re: Bad fics

(Anonymous) 2015-12-28 10:27 am (UTC)(link)
na

I thought the same thing, as not even the most egregious grammatical errors were caught.
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