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Board Writing :: Violations

The rules were designed to ensure the health of Board Writing and sanity of its patrons. Trying to make rules that ensure the authors write well is next to impossible. Therefore, all I can tell the authors out there is to Write Well! and hope it works. Of course, it won't, so whenever an author writes something that damages a story, you, the loyal reader, can make things right by reporting an error. You really don't have to read these to know when someone makes a mistake. These descriptions really serve to tell violators what exactly they did wrong.

Plot Holes

A plot hole occurs whenever a post is in direct violation of something that was previously stated, accepted as fact, or at least implied. This usually happens when an author did not read the story well enough before adding.

It can be something simple, such as getting hair or eye color wrong, or it can be something quite large, such as a hero saving the day with a magic sword that was recently swallowed by a dragon.

Poor Grammar

An occasional missed comma or typo doesn't mean a post should be deleted. This error should only be considered when an author's grammar is so poor that it is difficult or impossible to understand the meaning of the post.

Examples of poor grammar include a complete lack of puncuation or quotation marks (oh no he said when he ran in 2 teh cave ill stop you), jumbled or missing words (He his sword out and throat's goblin slit.), or other confusing writing (The orc swung his axe at the charging knight. He blocked his axe with his shield, and he swung, and he died. Who died?).

Style Shift

The writing style shifts when an addition did not use a similar structure or mood seen in previous posts. This is not to say that authors must write the same, but if a story begins as a first-person narrative, it should not turn into third-person.

Examples of a style shift include a changes in tense (present tense instead of past tense), characters suddenly speaking in stage directions (Pirate: Arrrrr! We be stoppin' ya yet!) instead of inline direct quotes ("Arrrrr!" said the pirate), or a serious story being turned into a comedy and vice versa.

Non Sequitur

Latin for "it does not follow." This violation applies to any addition that has absolutely no connection to the established story. It can also be applied to events that occur without any reason.

For example, if a story last left our heroes confronting an evil tyrant, and suddenly a robot breaks down the wall and carries them away to a lake, an obvious non sequitur has occurred. Another great (and common) example includes cutting away from a reveal set up by the previous post ("Don't you understand?" the old hag croaked with her last breaths. "The killer was..." / Then, back in the forest...!) and never touching upon it throughout the entire following addition.

Just Bad Writing

Writing that is unreadable is a terrible thing, but it does happen on occasion. We would like to think that these people are less than ten years old or perhaps learned English as a second language (and poorly at that), but that still would not excuse them. This cannot be a matter of opinion; the writing must be so poor that the story cannot continue as it once had before the addition was made.

Only the most serious of writing atrocities belong here. If the main villian is revealed to be the hero's father or an author just cannot get a laugh out of a comedic story or multiple sentences in all-caps appear in a row, the writing is bad enough to be considered for this problem.

Inappropriate

Additions are considered inappropriate when the "author" had no serious intent to add to the story but rather to attack the story for whatever idiotic reason they have. These typically feature attempts at being comical and insults to characters or actual authors.

This is the only type of error that can be logged that will not give the author a chance to edit their addition. It is also the only type which allows a moderator to delete the offending post without the three day waiting period.

Horrible!

This special violation applies only to single-author stories. If a story is considered horrible by enough readers, the entire story will be removed from Board Writing. If an author is going to be stuck-up and selfish enough not to write interactively, they better be good!

There will be many situations in which an offense by an author may fit into more than one of these categories. Just pick one of them when filing an error report; your description of the problem should make everything clear.

After reporting an error, an author has only three days to fix the problem; after that, any moderator can delete it. If a moderator does not agree with a complaint, it can be removed.

Only the most recent addition to a story can have a complaint filed against it. Any post made before that cannot fixed or edited since a change could alter the outcome of every addition after it.



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