Spell check your story

This is by far the easiest and least time consuming way to improve a story. With only a few keystrokes, a writer can correct dozens of errors in seconds, and a 100K story can be completely corrected within five minutes.

What's that you say? Too long, not enough time to run a spell checker? Even the most prolific writer can only do about 5K of text per hour, so there is no excuse for a method of correction that takes seconds. Good spelling won't make you look smart, but bad spelling will make you look stupid.

Grammar check your story

True, this is more difficult than spell checking, but it's still necessary. A spell check will not find errors when the wrong word has been used.

However, you don't need to go to any great lengths to correct a story's grammar; all you need is to do but two things:

• Never use contractions except during characters' speech
• Always check homophones or any word you are in doubt of its spelling

These two simple steps will catch more than 80% of all grammatical errors (mostly "your" and "you're", or "it's" and "its").

Leave one blank line between each paragraph

It requires only one extra keystroke to leave a blank line in a file. Even in a 100K file, this will add no more than 1K of extra characters, yet will go a long way to improving the story's legibility.

With no blank lines, the reader can easily be confused about which line he is reading. Every time this happens, the reader can become more disheartened, possibly giving up on the story. To add a blank line requires no extensive effort by the author, yet adds so much to the story's readability, that the reward far outweighs the effort.

Limit all lines of text to 70 characters in length

Many news and mail reading programs still only accept 72-80 characters
per line
of text. When lines go over this limit, the text is wrapped, making it
far more
difficult for readers to keep their place on the screen. Would you
describe
this paragraph as easy to read?

Reformatting text to 70 or fewer characters per line is neither difficult nor time consuming. As with spellchecking, it can be done automatically by software in a matter of seconds.

Use only the standard 7-bit ASCII set

Did you know there are more than a dozen differenct extended ASCII character sets throughout the world? That each is unique? That a character that may look right on one person's computer won't look right on another's computer?

A writer cannot assume that everyone uses the same computer, so why should the writer expect the reader to have the same software, the same language, the same configuration as he? It's an impossible request. By using standard 7-bit ASCII characters, it is guaranteed that the author's story will show up on all computers everywhere...well, except for EBCDIC based computers.

Don't use smartquotes, don't enter anything into your story that you cannot produce with the typewriter keys or with the shift key. The following characters are all you ever need to tell a story:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
1234567890!@#$%^&*()
-=_+`~[]{}\|;:'",.<>/?

Limit all sections of your story to 32K in size

Not all internet users have the newest news and mail reading programs; in fact, many still use software that is (by internet time lines) ancient. This is often not by choice. Many either cannot change their software (because their computer is old, or they don't know how) or do not want to (I still use certain 1980's DOS programs because they work the best for me).

If your story is over 32K in size, some software will not show or store the e-mail properly or at all. If the reader is not getting the mail, how can said reader possiblty read the story? There's no shame in having a story's subject header say "part 1 of 5".

Don't post stories as attachments

Many older news and mail programs cannot handle files or attachments. As with the previous point, some authors don't have a choice as to which software they use, or don't want to change. Authors should be accommodating to their readers, not vice versa.

Avoid using any Japanese words except where absolutely necessary

Even the most knowledgable anime fan may only know a few Japanese words. To assume many do, or to insist that they learn, is one of the surest ways to turn off a reader's interest.

Don't try to bluff or feign that you are somehow more knowledgable of Japanese culture and language. People will see through it and be inclined not to read your story. If so, what was ever the point of writing?