My first experience with Comment Swap! - Comments

The professional writing world will never look past your mistakes; send a manuscript with typos and grammatical errors and they throw it in the garbage. It's unreasonable to expect mistakes to be ignored. I'm happy when someone cares enough about my writing to point out mistakes.

I forgot to add: Grammar + Spelling + Punctuation + Capitalization = Plot + Characters + Setting + Description. It's something my Creative Writing teacher used to tell us, it means every element of the story is just as important as the last, if your story is written horribly but has an amazing story it is pointless. If a story is written amazingly but has no plot or interesting characters it is pointless. All your elements of writing have to be there or the whole story is pointless no matter what.

When I read a story where there is no punctuation and there are spelling errors I end up seeing only the errors. Those 'little mistakes' take away from your story. They ruin the flow and throw the reader off so it's harder to get into the story.

It bugs me when people say grammar and spelling isn't nearly as important as the content, because it is. If that user hadn't pointed out a mistake you may never learn that grammatic rule and you will continue to make the same mistake. If you can't get your story across because your work confuses your readers, than it's doing your story no justice. I'm one of the people who point out mistakes because when I first joined Mibba I made a ton of grammatical errors and without those people who corrected me I would still be making them. A lot of the things they suggest to improve usually are easy to catch just by reading it over before posting, which you should always do.

I understand it hurts a little, but the user is usually trying to help. If they said it in a rude way, maybe you should shoot them a message about it. If your readers are lying to you and only saying: "OMG I loooove this sooo much, update soon!" you're not getting the feedback you deserve. In my opinion, the Grammar Nazis are the people who save Mibba from becoming Quizilla. At least they are commenting on your story suggesting improvements rather than just straight up reporting it because there are errors.

My two cents worth.

I do like your layout.

And I found that even though I read through people's chapters and commented honestly on their spelling and stuff, PLUS their actually character, plot, and etc, people still actually were not reading my story. Not even reading the first chapter. I would get comments that just vaguely say: "I saw some grammar mistakes, but if you just look through blah blah blah, spelling is important, gramar is too, this is a goody story, I really enjoyed it." To me that just says that this person did not read my story and then proceeded to ramble about grammar for 200+ characters.

And thankyou for saying that thing about the grammar. IT IS NOT MOST IMPORTANT. It's an important factor, as is spelling, but face it: without a plot, character, setting, etc. you have no story. Everything is less important than those factors, at least to me.