I am naming this post: FanFiction Pet Peeves. It's a good name, really. This is a list of things that I have seen in fanfics that annoy me.
1. Bad spelling.Use a spell-checker. Especially bad about bad spelling is character names. (ex. O'Neill: two L's. He's said it in the show fer cryin' out loud! and Teal'c: T-E-A-L-'-C. Jack spelled it out for us in the second episode of SG-1, The Enemy Within.) Check spelling and check again. Check other fansites for your fandom to find out how to spell character names, place names, technology names, etc.
2. Bad grammer. Read your story a million times before you post it. If a sentence sounds wrong when you read it, try to fix it.
3. Putting the words "I suck at summaries" in your summary. If you can't write a summary about the story you've written then how do people like me know if they want to read it. A summary is your chance to convince people that they should read your story It should be filled with stuff about your story.
4. Putting the words "please review" in your summary. If you wrote your story so that you could put into words an idea that you had, then you did good. Reviews are very helpful, they can give some good advice on making your story better, and raise any questions that haven't been answered. Don't hold back chapters because people aren't reviewing.
5. "Please review. Reviews make me write faster". Almost everyone does this. I've been known to as well. Reviews don't really make us write faster. They make us write slower. Instead of writing we're reading reviews.
6. Putting the kind of story it is in the title. (ex. The Blue Pineapple short fic). That kind of information can go in the summary. It's not important enough to be in the title.
7. "This is my first fic please be nice". Yep, I'm guilty of this one as well. Welcome to the fanfic community, thank you for writing your fic, now can we read it? Just because it's your first fic, doesn't mean it's going to be bad. And just because it's your twentieth doesn't mean it's going to be a great work of literary art. Be confident about your work. And have fun reading other people's stories.
I think that's it.
