I dislike punctuation in poetry. I avoid punctuation at all times but when I do it is only the one I use at all given times. In other words I only use one form punctuation at any given time if not at all. You?
Wait, maybe I'm mistaken, punctuation is writing commas and dots and alike, isn't it? I'm just in the opposite side, @karina. I can't write well without (what I think is) proper punctuation. I also can't help to put proper punctuation in my mind while I read something. Example: I don't like to write anything in first person POV (I find it boring), although I can read it with some effort if it's very well written. And... I think that's all.
I've never gotten first person. To me it's like an annoying person on the buss trying to tell me their life story (sometimes while it's happening) while third to me is like watching a movie and that's how I want my stories, especially as a reader.
Tedious 3rd person accounts of nothing inside literary journals where the sole accomplishment is the reaching of an ending without anybody's hair catching fire in the excitement of spelling every word properly.
Tiny chapters annoy the crap out of me. I get why you'd want tiny chapters, but they still annoy the crap out of me. Writing them makes me feel lazy and reading them makes me feel disjointed, especially when there's a chapter heading when a paragraph break would have done nicely. I think this is like reason 57 why I don't like Dan Brown or The DaVinci Code very much. I think it has something like 130 chapters across 200 pages.
I generally do not care for 1st person, though there are some 1st person books that rank in my top favorite. Present tense is a 100% dealbreaker, though. No. No, no, no. Chasing Beautiful Brooding Broken Boys™. I get the appeal when you're younger, but let me tell you, I caught more than a few of them in my real-life younger days and they are more trouble than they are ever, ever worth. You'll never fix them, and youthful prettiness - be it male or female - is shockingly fleeting, and all you're left with is brooding and broken. Have fun with that.
I like "Prologues" and "Epilogues", but footnotes are kind of distracting. I'd transfer all these to an "Author Notes" section at the end of the book. I like to read the "Notes" part when it's kind of a "Making of". It's the best way to fulfill a good book.
Because of Spanish. Same reason sloppy verb tenses give me the twitches. We don't do that in Spanish... ever.
I am the total opposite. When I look back what I wrote when I created this thread is that there are no punctuation in the intro at all apart from the FULL STOP. I was not even thinking when I proceeded to write it which confirms my dislike of punctuation.
Thinking about it... Commas - if you go back, check something you wrote/& sent away the same day, always commas after every writer grunt or shift on the seat. You take out the commas and you have written a ten line long sentence that can be interpreted about 30 different ways. Which must be better than the READ, IT, LIKE, THIS of the lesser mortals/weevils. ALSO - jumped thread For me, the trickiest part is omission of def and indef article - as in duplication of rhythm/speech patterns of the folk surrounding - and the entire world's subsequent confusion. That pisses me off.
Lots of them. Though I understand why we need them, otherwise it would just be alphabet soup. People who are too strict about grammar in 1st POV. I feel it limits the characterization a little, with the missing short jaunty sentences and such. Another is contractions, and people who think it's odd that some of us don't use them in narration, since we feel it looks a tad bit sloppy( though in my case it might detract from all the other slop.) That pesky point where you are not sure if you need an apostrophe or not. Or do I need to follow it with an s from a name or place that ends in s. It is the bane of my writing sometimes.
Commas drive me crazy after having to re-learn them to fit various style guides. All of my English teachers would go apoplectic at the thought of not putting a comma before the "and" in a list. All of my editors would go apoplectic at the thought of putting one in. The resulting mishmash of comma usage requires a lot of extra care when I edit.
I may be in the minority but I don't like the cliche of having a love interest. This goes for films too. It's so horrendously cliche. Sometimes, the love interest brings nothing to the story. Everything that happened can happen just the same without them. I guess it's to make them more human or relatable? With me, it does the exact opposite. I think you can tell how good of a storyteller someone is if you read one of their stories without a love interest or 'supporter' and find yourself deep into the story.
Commas and paragraph breaks both indicate a time when the reader should briefly pause to consider what they just read. They both can often be omitted or added in order to adjust the pacing of a scene. The difference is that paragraphs break up scenes, and commas break up sentences. Rules that prescribe when to include commas or paragraph breaks often miss this point.
Pretty much any time I walk into the bookshop to kill some time and not buy a book I pick up a book and start 'gnashing' at any deviation from my own exact way of phrasing the clause. 'Who published this shit?' Then I go and read the celebrity biographies.
Commas get personal and political. Those people with their exact and exacting commas - the 'read, my stawy, exactly, this way, I direct, you, might get lost, over?'
