Being totally honest here, this article falls short for me from both a technical writing perspective, and for content.

Your "writing style" is fragmented, no fluidity, you need to use transitions whenever possible, this is what makes it easy to read/digest.

Content... the first thing that got me was the overly poetic nature of the intro, an intro that doesn't seem to relate to the body at all. The three "tips" are not well associated, they are very much just random ideas.

"Love in Vancouver, A Holiday Minefield", what does this title really have to do with office hookups, break up gifts, and lumberjack cuddles?

Just seems to me that you are trying to hard, you need to relax your writing a little bit.

Not trying to offend, feedback is a valuable tool, if anything you should thank me for writing this by providing me with free porn, thx.

It's a bit too choppy imo.

Here's the tip to make it flow better without doing much: drop the serial comma.

This is also the first thing that came to my mind when I read the article. You don't need 8 adjectives in every sentence to paint a picture, in fact sometimes less is more as you let people create their own scene. It sort of reads like a high school paper where you had a minimum word count and had to come up with ways to say one sentence in four, ad nauseum. It's an interesting and fun concept but you need to take a little time to self-edit.

Mark

Asking the naked chick that is still laying in your crusty bed sheets and a couple of your buddies to read your article before you e-mail it to the editor is not a "test audience".

:fullofwin:

Can't let the sheets get like that, I sleep on black satin, after a week it starts to look like a dark car parked under a tree full of well-fed birds

Focus on one thing and do it well. If you do not do it well, do not continue to do it unless you are committed to improving your craft by learning from masters of said craft.

Not everyone is Hemingway. You can't apply pen to paper and expect brilliance. If you had a natural gift for wordcraft, we would not be telling you that your writing needs improvement.

Do you think Caravaggio just one day picked up a brush and painted the Conversion of Saint Paul? No. He trained for years.
Do you think ee cummings won the Guggenheim Fellowship twice because he had a good PR team promoting him? No. He wrote every day for 14 years and went to Harvard to refine his craft.

Your artificial playboy lifestyle wore thin here when your stories got old and you used this community to promote your "magnum opus". Now you're back and have socially engineered your way into writing for a blog with a limited audience and hope that this will impress us.

Please, please, please take our advice and work on your writing. Take some classes. That is the most constructive I've seen this board be in critiquing your work so you should take it and run with it.

If fame is your only aspiration, I suggest softening those lips of yours and releasing a video of you fellating Ray J as Kim Kardashian did. That is the only way a talentless person who isn't willing to put in the work to improve will become "famous".


Good luck!

And, no doubt, crawlin' with crabs and regret :fullofwin:

I like you. Nohomo.

Earning renown is not always based on talent or skill, in fact, one could argue it's simply well-targeted marketing!

I don't aspire to be a great writer, in fact I would say I'm more of a creative-type rather than a writer per se. Writing is just the most affordable form of self-expression.

Besides, Revscene follows me on Twitter, so you have to like what I've been posting there. :)

Ooh. This is awkward...

I.. I make sure that account follows all Revscene members...

....so don't take a Twitter follow as an endorsement that you are a beautiful and unique snowflake

Lies, you follow my every move with bated breath.

as you have put this piece up to be assessed, my assessment is i read half of it and didn't want to keep on reading through a combination of a dry subject matter and awkward writing style.

i assume this isn't a source of income.

:nyan:

I'm not saying that a follow from @Revscene is the equivalent of a participation ribbon during Sports Day at school, I'm just saying that @Revscene is more of an announcement tool.

We want you to well, Jason. We want you to succeed. We're trying to help here. Although our words are packaged with pithy, cutting remarks, we wouldn't waste our bandwidth if we didn't want to see a local boy do good and write something we can all pop our corks to.

Ya know, at the very least I'd like to give Jason props for putting some life into RS right now. This forum has been pretty fucking stale as of late and this thread has certainly piqued some interest.

*piqued

Since this thread is about criticizing grammar, you are not immune.

A few of you have provided jason with actual, useful, constructive criticism, but he doesn't seem to take it very well. Instead, he responds with "well, my buddies liked it!".

i completely misread that the first time :badpokerface:

I'm not sure if Jason is really looking for constructive criticism or actual reviews. Seems more of a method to spam/market/get page clicks for his work. Same as his previous tactics

He definately has a talent for playing RS members.

As long as I say interesting shit to the right audience, it doesn't have to be well-written, just the content of the message needs to resonate with the reader. For every different type of reader that exists, there is also another different style of writing.

To describe my own, I try taking a surreal metamodernist approach to unraveling what makes modern life so completely baffling and interesting at the same time. Life can be said to be a test of your own limits, how and why we create arbitrary limits for ourselves is what I enjoy researching.

We aren't in a time where people can go off and climb uncharted mountaintops for national glory like in the movie "The North Face", nor is there any just war you can sign up with the merchant marines and go fight in. Google Earth will tell you what is in every direction from your house, and pretty much uncovers all corners of the earth. So much of the adventure and new exploration of life is gone, at least in a physical sense. Caving has been growing as a sport, unexplored underground tunnels being one of the last places unexplored by humans. What's left?

Social exploration. The discovery of new ways to live, new ways to earn an income, new crypto-currencies to invest in, and new ways to date and love, these are some of the things I like to daydream about. Hopefully some of the things I think about will be appealing in some sort of creative form and eventually earn me an income doing what I love, which is daydreaming, and passing on my crazy bullshit. :)

If I ever hit the big time I will drive around with RS members in my gold Ferrari doing key bumps in the Wendy's drive-thru